He Dreams He's Awake
by MissiAmphetamine
Summary: He saves her life, and thinks he hates her for what it does to him. She tells herself she owes him, and can't let the debt slide. Forty-nine days post-battle, Draco gets a visitor to the Janus Thickey Ward at St Mungo's, where the days tick by meaninglessly. Hermione just wants to help someone else pick up the pieces, because she can't pick up her own. DH compliant. EWE?
1. One

**Disclaimer: JK owns the 'verse, I'm just playing in it.**

**Author's Note:** I know, I know - I should be finishing TJWF, but in my defence I got a plot bunny that wouldn't hop away - what can I say? I plan for it to be around 40K max, and somewhat similar in atmosphere and style to _What He Requires._ Sad, sweet, and sprinkled with angst, it's ultimately going to be a story about healing. The title belongs to a wonderful _Stars_ song.

I hope you enjoy ^_^

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۞ **Part One **۞

**Room 7, Janus Thickey Ward, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

The day is dreary grey outside, rain smattering steadily on the window panes as a thin, wan face looks out the window. Faint curiosity drifts over vague features at the sight of the street three stories below, and the bustling activity going on in it despite the dreadful weather.

Eyes the colour of the rain-drizzling sky fix on the cars whizzing through puddles and sending up sprays of muddy water, take in the sea of umbrellas bobbing along. The hurrying seethe of rain-bedraggled people without the foresight to have umbrellas. The busy, scurrying _life_, vibrant and brilliant in the dismal day. He doesn't care that they are only Muggles; he twinges with a weary kind of envy anyway.

Fingers tremble as a bony hand lifts unsteadily to the glass, flattening with painful difficulty against it. It is so interesting out there compared to his usual view of pale blue walls, darker blue linoleum floor, and white ceiling. Before he had taken his potions this morning and been escorted to this room, he had been only in windowless places for what he had been told was weeks. Now he has a _window_, and that is…good, he thinks dully, without truly feeling it.

His hand slips from the glass as it spasms and he frowns and huddles in on himself a little, unable to summon up anger at his traitorous body. He thinks he should like having a window more than he does. He thinks he should be angrier at the ways his body and mind don't work. The potions he is given make the pain go away and keep the seizures at bay, but he doesn't think he likes what they do to his mind. They unravel him to uncertain threads that blow away in a puff of air, and he loses what little he has left of himself.

This is what is left of Draco Abraxas Malfoy. A shell, a broken husk, his mind scattered and body wretched, nearly forgotten by the world after his quick and quiet post-war transfer to St Mungo's.

He blinks and the world doubles, before his vision hazes completely and clears again. And again. And again. If he could summon the will to care what has become of him, he would fling himself out the damned window headfirst, but he…can't… Draco's mind rushes and slows in meaningless blurs, his senses deaden as the potions kick in and eliminate the pain constantly sparking along his nerves. His body begins to slump awkwardly in the chair, eyes vacant as they stare at the wall opposite.

His fingers twitch.

"-shifted him this morning," Draco hears a Healer say out in the hallway, and comes back to himself with half-frightened confusion. He has no idea how much time has passed, but his body feels stiff and sore from sitting in one position too long and there is an untouched tray of food in front of him. Dinner food. And he has no recollection of lunch, no memory of the time between looking out at the rain-smeared morning, and now. It is dark outside; the streetlights twinkle fractured through the wet glass.

Anger swells up in him at the lost time, and he realises he can grasp the anger – _feel_ it. His mind is sharper although it still feels like a sieve, and his nerves are firing with hot pain, his muscles constantly tensing and twitching. The effects of the potions have nearly worn off, then. It is a catch-22; the potions nearly eliminate the pain and spasms that are still ever-present, and lower the likelihood of larger seizures – but they also leave him drifting numbly inside his already damaged mind. It has not even been two months yet by his fuzzy count, and already Draco thinks he would rather he had died that day.

"How has he been?" A different female voice asks with genuine concern and Draco recognises the voice with a start, jerking upright in his chair and biting back a moan at the pain at the movement. It can't be her. No. No, no, no. Panic rushes through him, his breath catching and chest tightening.

"He's been recovering," the Healer says, right outside the door to Draco's room, a dismissive sort of disinterest in her tone. "And that's certainly more than we expected of him."

"Thank you for letting me see him," the other woman says earnestly. "I know visitors aren't usually allowed."

Draco presses his lips together, shuts his eyes, and makes his weak and treacherous hands clutch at the arms of his chair as hard as they will. It is her, and he wishes it wasn't so badly. Being forgotten is preferable to her seeing him like this – the damaged wretch he has been made into. Fury rushes hot and impotent through him and his hands tremble from the exertion and fall uselessly away from the chair arms.

"We wouldn't refuse you, love –" the Healer says brightly, and Draco could _murder_ the woman. "– You're a war hero!"

"Oh! I'm sure I'm not. _Really_. I – I can't… Er, well, thank you anyway. I won't stay long," says the younger woman, sounding horribly uncomfortable with the Healer's heaping of praise, and Draco wishes he were anywhere but here. He cannot stomach a visit from Hermione Granger. Unfortunately, he doesn't get a choice in _anything_ anymore.

"When you're ready to leave just tear the chit I gave you in two, and the spell will alert me to come collect you." The joys of being in a locked ward, Draco thinks, grasping each word slowly and carefully as he often does now, to make sure they are set straight in his mind. "He's coming up due his potions, so he should be lucid enough. And don't worry, love, he's weaker than the cafeteria tea right now; he won't hurt you."

There is a pause.

"I know," Hermione Granger says. "I know he wouldn't."

Her voice is steady and so damned earnest that Draco cringes bone-deep, hating her for it. He doesn't want the mudblood's understanding. Her pity. Her belief that he is not the enemy because of one…_mistake_. A sneer wobbles on his face. He may have lost his dignity, but he still keeps the tattered remains of his pride as best he can.

Draco stares hard out the window at the lights below - shimmering with jagged haloes in the rain - as the door to his room opens. He ignores the young woman who stands uncertainly in the doorway, the door swinging shut behind her with a hollow clang. This will not be pleasant for either of them, and he will try to make sure she doesn't come back. Because if the only person who will ever visit him is Hermione Granger, then Draco would rather rot alone.

"Hello, Malfoy." In his peripheral vision he sees Granger force a small smile as she sits down in a chair positioned at the other side of the window. His eyes flick to her, his features carefully expressionless. She clutches a bag in her lap, sitting prim and proper in casual Muggle clothing, that ridiculous hair pulled back off her face. He looks away.

She is neat, bright, and _free;_ in full possession of her mind and her body, her faculties undimmed. He sits in his too-big hospital pyjamas marked by old stains, his body clean only by virtue of scourgify charms that leave his skin dry and raw and his hair lank. The Healers will not waste time assisting a Death Eater to bathe – Draco is not sure he would let them, anyway. His muscles tremble and twitch until he wants to scream. The pain is _maddening_.

And she sits there with a slightly nervous smile, and he _hates_ her.

"Fff-fuck off, Granger," Draco gets out with stammering difficulty, and his face goes hot with frustration and embarrassment at the struggle. His voice is still rough from the damage he did to his throat with all the screaming and vicious with bitterness besides, and he keeps staring out at the Muggle street. There are no tears in his eyes, he tells himself, and blinks them back desperately.

"_Well_. You certainly _are _recovering," she says, annoyingly undaunted by his anger if her tone of voice is any indication. And then she becomes quieter, more serious. "The last time I saw you was right after the Battle of Hogwarts. The Aurors were taking you to – to Azkaban for holding, along with all the other surviving Death Eaters. You looked like you were already dead…except for the, ah, seizures." Granger pauses, and Draco clenches his jaw hard, wishing over and over that she would just _leave_.

"I tried to stop them, to explain to them that you'd sa-" she begins apologetically, and Draco flinches, jerking his head around so that his eyes meet hers, bloodshot and hateful.

"_Don't_. I w-wish I hadn't, mm…mm…mudblood." He is shaking - shaking from more than just the spell damage. There is fury too, roiling in him, drowning him beneath its rising tide. His pulse races and his breath hisses from between his teeth as he struggles to manage both his anger and his pain. Granger just looks at him, calm and full of a pity he doesn't want.

"I understand, Malfoy," she says, the lying bitch, her brown eyes soft with sympathy, and only a little hurt by the slur he'd snarled at her. Draco wants to _hit_ her. Choke her. Make her hurt as much as he does. And the pain…Salazar, the _pain_ is so bad. It has grown exponentially in the last few moments as the last dose of potion has worn off completely, and he _needs_ more.

Needs…

He tries to speak but his throat will not cooperate, his tongue is leaden, his lips numbed and trembling. Then everything blurs and twists as his body suddenly jerks and convulses in the chair. The minor muscle twitches that he is learning to live with become real convulsions, and the muscles spasm hard and agonisingly beneath his skin.

Some small part of Draco's brain is aware enough to register the humiliation of this complete betrayal by his body, in front of Hermione Granger no less. He hopes with a detached kind of terror that he doesn't piss himself. But the pain searing through him like liquid fire is enough to erase all real thought in seconds, to blot him out in red and screams.

Draco does not feel his fall to the floor where his back arches like a bowstring and his teeth grind together, his hands claw at the linoleum and his heels drum hard against it. He is unaware of Hermione's frantic calls of his name, the chit the Healer gave her fluttering to the floor torn in two as she hovers helplessly beside him. He is eaten by the pain as Hermione summons up awkward reassurances to stumble out while she waits anxiously for the Healer.

The first thing Draco knows is the horrible bind of _petrificus totalus_ as a Healer bends over him, dripping the familiar aniseed flavoured potion too-fast between his lips. He chokes and tries to thrash, to speak, but the spell prevents it. Tears of reaction spring to his eyes, and his throat bobs automatically around the potion as the Healer lightly massages it.

He is utterly helpless.

His eyes dart about and fall on Granger, standing with her back to the window, one arm hugged around her waist protectively. Her other hand wipes roughly at her cheeks, which are wet and blotchy. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and she pulls in a hitching breath and presses her fingers to her lips for a moment, composing herself.

"How – how often does this happen?" Granger asks the Healer shakily, as Draco rages silently against the spell that holds him pinned like a beetle to the floor. The Healer's doughy features change from badly-hidden contempt to admiration as she looks from Draco to Granger. She drip-drips the medicine steadily, not allowing Draco's body a chance to draw a proper breath, and he _knows_ she's doing it deliberately.

"Every two or three days," the Healer tells Granger, who blanches further and hugs both arms tighter around her middle.

"That often?" She sounds shaken and disbelieving, and her gaze finally meets Draco's. He is panicky with the lack of air now, and his eyes are starkly pleading. He needs to take a proper breath, he needs the _petrificus_ lifted, he's fucking _panicking_ and can't even _show_ it, can't even beg for help. He stares at Granger desperately, trying to communicate with his eyes alone and hating that he is driven to it.

"The seizures were much more frequent initially – several times a day when he first arrived here. But the regimen of potions he's been placed on has reduced them greatly," the Healer says calmly, still drip-feeding Draco the potion while his body silently screams for oxygen.

"I – I think you can lift the _petrificus_," Granger says with a little worry, flicking her eyes from Draco to the Healer. Hope surges up in Draco.

"Oh, I find it best to keep him bound until he's had the full dose and time to absorb it," the Healer says persuasively, seeming puzzled and annoyed by Granger's attitude toward the once-Death Eater. Draco curses the bitch, wishing he had his magic and the ability to use it wandlessly. This particular Healer relishes her chances to treat him less than well – generally only when he's lucid enough to care, but occasionally while he is drifting half-catatonic as well.

"No. He looks upset," Granger insists, taking a step forward, her voice rising. "Let him go, please! I can see that the seizures have stopped; he's conscious – look at his eyes. Please, just let him go!"

The Healer tips the last dregs of the potion into Draco's mouth without warning, and pushes herself to her feet. "Of course, Miss Granger," she says stiffly as Draco's lungs burn for air, his vision dims and sparkles, and he tries to swallow and can't. Everything starts to fade out and his body frantically tries to breathe, sucking the potion down the wrong way in its bid for air.

"_Finite incantatum_," the Healer says then as if from very far away, and Draco jerks weakly on the floor. He coughs and chokes, spitting out the potion and scrabbling over onto his stomach. For a moment he lies there and just gasps into the lino between coughing fits, throat and lungs sore as hell now, along with the rest of him.

"Merlin! Malfoy, are you all right?"

He tries to shove himself up with his hands but his left arm goes out from under him, and he drops – Granger catches him just before his face hits the ground. She is surprisingly strong, helping him up into an awkward sitting position without too much effort. Or perhaps he is just that pathetically thin now – and from the surprised hiss she makes as her hands clasp over the knobbly bones of his shoulders, it's probably that.

"God, Malfoy," she mutters worried as she kneels beside Draco and conjures up a handkerchief for him to wipe the potion and saliva from around his mouth. "I'm so sorry. I had no idea…" Granger is distraught and babbling, and his hand shakes violently as he tries to scrub the handkerchief over his mouth and chin. He ignores her.

"I didn't think…going through…this bad…because you – you _saved_ me." That jerks him out of the dazed state he is drifting in, and he narrows his eyes on her, fingers jittering around the handkerchief. "And I never even thanked you." Granger's eyes shine wet. "I'm so sorry Malfoy."

He turns his face away from her distressed sincerity, something bitter and wounded twisting in his gut.

"And n-now you have th-thanked me. For all the good it does me. So ff-fuck off, mudblood," Draco tells her roughly, as if he is wrenching the words out with physical effort, shivering all over as though he's feverish. Granger stands and takes a sliding step back, shoes whispering on the lino. She looks crumpled and teary as she stares down at him, and Draco approves of that.

"You want me to go, Malfoy?"

He wants to dig at her with some wittily nasty comeback, but instead he just manages a ragged but emphatic: "_Yes._"

Granger stares at him an uncertain moment, shifting her bag over her shoulder, hands wrapped white-knuckled around the bag strap. Her breath sighs out and her features are carved with weary lines.

"I came here to try to do three things - to thank you, to tell you how sorry I am, and to see if I could…help you –"

"I'm not a fucking house elf," he snarls as he flails out at the nearby chair and catches the leg of it, pulling it closer and using it to painfully drag himself up to his feet.

"I know, I just…it's my fault she –" Granger looks down at her feet, and the next words are quieter, _small_. "– Tortured you." She meets Draco's eyes again as he manages to stand at last, unsteady and in pain, but upright. "I feel like I owe it to you to try to help you, if I can."

"I don't w-ww-want your help, _mudblood_," he gets out, breathing hard and clinging to the chair, determined to stay standing.

Hermione Granger's face shifts; frustration and confusion shaping her and tipping over into directionless anger. "Then why did you save me?" she demands at nearly a yell, her body vibrating with tension. "Why did you save me if you hate me so damn much?"

The Healer is smiling a faint, unpleasant smile as she watches silently, no doubt happy that Granger's sympathy toward Draco has faded. He hates the woman. His legs nearly give out as a spasm runs through them and he wobbles dangerously for a moment before he answers.

"It – wwwas a mistake." He speaks low and vehement, every word carefully enunciated, resentment and hate boiling, seething furiously. "It was a _mm-mistake_. It wasn't like I wanted to save you, Granger, I just wasn't_ th-thinking_."

Granger is very pale, and her fingers twist restlessly in her bag strap. "Well…regardless of that, thank you anyway, Malfoy. And I really am so sorry that…" She drifts off uncomfortably, before sighing and looking up at him again. Her mouth curves into a faint, sad kind of smile. "Two out of three isn't bad, I suppose." She takes another step back, eyes turning to the Healer, who looks caught between displeasure and schadenfreude at Draco's expense. "Healer Dawes, will you see me out?"

Granger says goodbye to him very calmly and he stays silent, lips pressed hard together, small spasms seizing different muscles every few seconds. As soon as the door swings shut Draco collapses heavily into the chair, panting and pained. The pale pink handkerchief Granger had conjured sits crumpled and damp in his hand as it falls limply open in his lap.

The potion begins to take effect, shrouding Draco in a haze of dull numbness. His thoughts crowd and shift unsettlingly and incoherently, until one floats to the top. No, he hadn't been thinking when he had saved Granger…but perversely, Draco doesn't know that he entirely regrets it, either.

**Vue Cinema, Islington, London**

Hermione's mind wanders for a moment, falling into the count that she keeps slipping back to in her weaker moments. Sometimes it helps, and sometimes it hurts. Usually it hurts, but she can't seem to stop.

It has been three days since Hermione's disastrous visit to see Malfoy in the Janus Thickey Ward at St Mungo's. She is still deeply unsettled by it, in too many complicated, blurring ways to hope to untangle her feelings right now.

It's been eleven long, sleepless nights since the still-disorganised Auror department regretfully informed her with a cool dispassion that her parents had been found and murdered by Death Eaters. All her precautions had been for nothing.

Twenty-two days have dragged by since Harry fled Britain alone, for what he called a 'retreat' at a magic-friendly monastery in Nepal. Hermione bitterly calls it 'running away' when she is feeling abandoned and lonely, although she realises that Harry _needed_ to escape for a while or risk breaking. He, of all of them, carried the greatest burden for the longest. But she misses him so much.

Twenty-three days ago, Hogwarts had reopened, and Ginny had gone back – her head held high and eyes dry despite her grief. Merlin, there was so much grief; it swamped the wizarding world and no one was completely untouched by it.

Thirty days ago, Hermione had started taking Muggle anti-anxiety pills; the only way she could function without falling apart constantly. She thought she might be becoming dependent.

Thirty-seven days ago Mrs Weasley had come to see Hermione at 12 Grimmauld Place, and had made her get out of bed, and shower for the first time in days. The older witch had held Hermione tightly and cried with her, and then told her with loving brusqueness that she had to snap out of it. That she had to try to live.

Hermione tried, so hard.

But fifty-two days ago the Battle of Hogwarts – as it is already being called – took place, and the world had changed fundamentally. _Hermione's_ world had changed.

Fifty-two days ago Voldemort had been destroyed, and Tonks, Remus, Fred, Lavender, and so, so many more had all fallen bravely in the fight.

Fifty-two days ago Draco Malfoy had inexplicably saved Hermione from being murdered at Bellatrix Lestrange's hands, and been tortured nearly to death for his betrayal.

Fifty-two days ago, Ron had...

Hermione sucks in a sharp, rough breath, fighting the sudden tears that sting hotly at her eyes. _Ron_… She snatches her bag up from between her feet in the dark, and Neville nudges her with an elbow from his seat beside hers.

"You all right?" he whispers, eyes darting from the Muggle movie to Hermione, and she nods hastily in the bluish light as she digs through her handbag for her pills. She doesn't trust her voice.

But she can't find the pill bottle and the panic and grief is bubbling up too quickly. Her breath is dragging frantic and she's freaking out, scrabbling desperately through her bag.

_Ron, Ron, Ron_ – his name is a litany in her head, growing louder and louder.

Hermione gasps out the prelude to a sob, swearing breathlessly at her bag and feeling like an idiot. But she can't _accio_ the pills, because they're in Muggle London so her wand is stuffed in her bag too, and she can't concentrate enough for a wandless charm to summon either it or the pills.

People around them begin to shush Hermione with annoyed whispers, and the tears finally spill over in a rush. Then Neville is grabbing her wrists and still her frantic movements, his face concerned in the flickering light of the screen.

"Hermione, it's all right. Hermione – Hermione, it's all right," he says softly, his face close to hers in the dark and his tone trying so hard to be soothing. But he's lying – it's not all right, and it never will be again.

Neville pulls Hermione gently but firmly up to her feet and she has enough sense left to her to follow his lead. So Hermione holds tightly onto her handbag and tries to apologise through her tears to the other moviegoers they disturb, as Neville guides her swiftly out of the crowded cinema.

They stand in the hallway alone as the door swings shut with a squeak behind them, the air smelling of popcorn, faint electronic beeps and trills coming from the cinema's Time Out zone. Neville holds her as she cries into his shirt.

"It's not fair, Neville – none of it's fair. Poor Teddy without his parents, and Fred, and – and, oh god, _Ron_…"

"I know it's not fair, I know..." He pats her back with an awkward, gentle affection, hushing her softly.

"We never even got the chance to find out if we could've been – been more," she sobs, her fingers curling in the back of Neville's unbuttoned cardigan. "_God. _We wasted so much _time_."

"Ron was your best friend and you loved him – and he knew that, Hermione. That's…well, that's something. Something pretty important, really," Neville tries to comfort her, and it works, a small amount at least. Her tears dry up with a little effort and deep breathing, and Hermione ends up huffing damp laughter as she steps back from Neville, and sees the wet splotches of tears on his shirt.

"I'm sorry." She brushes at the wet marks with light, apologetic fingers, and smiles shakily up at Neville. He pats her shoulder and tells her it's fine. It's easier for him, and he's happy to be a shoulder to cry on – or so he'd insisted the first time Hermione did just that not long after Harry left. His parents were already mad, he'd said in a way that spoke of old, deep pain, and his grandmother had survived the battle. He has still lost friends, but he is certainly coping much better than Hermione.

"And I'm sorry I made you miss the rest of the movie," Hermione adds, sweeping her fingers over her cheeks to wipe away the tears. Her expression is rueful, and embarrassment at her meltdown rears its ugly head. Neville shakes his head and shrugs a shoulder with casual dismissal.

"It's fine, Hermione." His grin is toothy and lopsided. "It wasn't that good anyway."

They decide by unanimous vote to go have dinner instead of watching another movie. A fragile kind of happiness shapes between them, and they preserve it carefully, watching what they say. They get takeaways from the local chippy in the end, and eat it out of the greasy paper at Grimmauld; sitting on the stairs together and throwing chips at the irate portrait of Mrs Black.

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**Author's Note: **I hope you liked it so far! Please leave a comment and let me know what you think; reviews are good food for the muse :3


	2. Two

_Thank you so much to those who are reading and reviewing! I appreciate it greatly._

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**۞ Part Two ۞**

**Room 7, Janus Thickey Ward, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

The flush of the toilet echoes in the tiled space, and the tap whines as Draco washes his hands, unsteady on his feet. His last dose of potions have half worn off, and he is caught somewhere between lucidity and that drifting, weird numbness, small spasms starting to flicker in his muscles. He turns the water off with a clumsy effort, and then stares at his reflection in the mirror. The bright white light of the globes floating in the small bathroom off his room make him look already dead, Draco thinks with disgust.

His hands – thin, bony and dotted with multicoloured bruises from flailing convulsions – grip tightly onto the edge of the porcelain basin for balance as he leans in toward the mirror. Draco examines himself with glassy eyes set in dark hollows, his pupils contracted to pinpricks from the potions he takes, the white bloodshot. Bruises smatter his exposed skin, from fresh to nearly faded, disappearing under the hospital issue tee-shirt and trousers. His skin itself is ashen and waxy, the bones beneath showing through too clearly.

He edges closer towards skeletal with each passing day, Draco thinks dully.

His hospital garb hangs off him, gaping and bagging, the material a dirty white, thin and stained from years of use. Draco's hair falls forward and into his eyes as he stares at himself, and it is straggling and brittle and long enough that he could nearly tie it back if he wished. His jaw is roughened by patchy stubble that the Healers don't bother to shave regularly. He looks into the mirror and sees an upright corpse. An Inferi in waiting.

Draco remembers how he used to be and his throat bobs as he gulps. His head bows jerkily, his eyes slide closed. And then his right hand stutters free of its grip on the basin edge in a spasm, and a muffled, animal sound of despair and pain claws past his lips. He steps back and stumbles as his right leg goes out from under him, twisting to fall back against the wall, standing there and wrenching in wounded gasps of air for a moment. His hands try to make fists, and anger slices across his face when they won't cooperate. His chin trembles and his eyes shine wet. He _hates _this. He wishes his darling Aunt Bella had finished the damn job.

Draco lurches toward the door using the wall as a prop, fumbling with the handle before stumbling through, eyes shutting as a wave of pain threatens to drown him. The pain comes more often when he moves around. Spasms shoot up and down his right leg and his fingers flutter aimlessly at his sides, the muscles and tendons twitching and ratcheting tight as bowstrings. They _whine_ and _hum_ with the pain. He wants to escape, but there's nowhere he can go to get away from his own body, and this stark, pale room is a prison.

He feels like crying.

"M-Malfoy?" His head jerks up in alarm as a female voice crumples the silence with quiet awkwardness. Granger – the mudblood, he tells himself numbly – stands by the window in jeans and a red blouse with the sleeves turned back to her elbows, the splash of vivid colour too bright for this stark, lifeless room. Her dark eyes are worried, and her hands are knotting nervously together in front of her. She _stares_ at him as he stands there across the small room from her, exposed; broken and pain-twisted, listing slightly on the spot as his leg trembles under his weight. Shame heats Draco's face and he ducks his head, rubs the back of one hand beneath each eye in case the wetness in them has overflowed.

"G-g-get out," is all he says in a low voice, lifting his face enough to see Granger's through the uneven veil of his fringe. She fidgets there before the window, her whole presence apologetic as she turns to look away from Draco. Her gaze goes out the window – through the bars to the world outside, which is smeared in afternoon light that falls from cloudless blue above the buildings. She is pallid in the warm light and there are dark shadows from lack of sleep that rival his own beneath her eyes. The French braid twisting back her dark hair is messy, and her red shirt is buttoned up wrong.

Recognition sparks in Draco's blurred mind as he watches Hermione, twisting her hands together and staring out at the afternoon with squinting eyes that shine too wetly to be accounted for by only the sunlight.

"I'm sorry to just intrude on your room unannounced, Malfoy," she says quietly instead of damn well leaving. He clutches at the wall for balance and _breathes_ through his resentment and fury, silently willing her to _go_. "The Healer said I couldn't wait outside in the corridor, so…"

"Get _out_," he says again without hesitation, because he shouldn't care that Hermione Granger is losing sleep, or want to know why. He limps painfully across the room toward her as he speaks. It takes only ten steps but feels like struggling through quicksand, and he can feel her watching him with sad dark eyes. Draco hates her for seeing this, and shame keeps his eyes locked to the floor.

He braces himself on the window sill with an elbow, opposite Granger and only a few feet away, refusing to sit in the chair just behind him. His hand curls around one of the window bars; hot from the sun. She smells of cinnamon. It is a welcome variation to the bitter medicinal scent that everything in St Mungo's seems to exude. He breathes in the scent of the spice deeply, his face set into hard, cold lines; his expression telling her to _leave _as his voice does the same. "I wasn't aa-aasking, Granger."

She lifts her head so that she can meet his eyes, and she wears her emotions on her face and he can't stand it.

"Malfoy… Please." It is strange to gaze down at Granger and be reminded that he is so much taller than her, when he feels so insubstantial, so small and crumpled. Her hand comes up to pluck at a small locket at her throat, rubbing it between finger and thumb unconsciously as she persists. "Just give me a –"

"G-g-get the _ff-fuck_ out_._" Draco snarls it, but his voice is curiously flat and dulled to his own ears, and it stutters when a tangle of pain laces up his arm and knots in his shoulder. Granger purses her lips and sighs as if _he_ is being the frustrating one here, and it rankles at him in an absurdly ordinary way that he almost welcomes.

"Malfoy… I just – I thought you might not be told – I thought that you'd like to know the results of your parents' trials," she says fast and apologetic, before he can tell her to get out again. The words rush at Draco, crash over him, ringing in his ears. The breath caves out of him and he clings tighter to the window bar, swaying against the window and staring down at Granger with eyes he knows are wide and frightened.

He doesn't have to ask, which is good because he is afraid of what might come out of his mouth if he tries to speak. Granger's expression is too-gentle and her voice too-quiet, nearly lost beneath the wet thundering of his pulse in his ears and the sporadic sharp flashes of pain that are happening more often now.

"– Wizengamot convened to pass judgment this morning…vote was unanimous…father was found guilty on multiple charges, including –" He stares at Granger's mouth moving as she rattles off his father's crimes; her lips are full and unpainted and she wets the dulled pink of them now and then with a flick of her tongue. "– sentenced him to twelve years, eight without parole."

This time when Draco's legs go weak it is not the spell damage, but emotion. Granger jumps forward and reaches out to help him, and he bats her hand away roughly as he stumbles back into the chair just behind him. His breath comes rough and ragged and he is not sure if he is relieved because it could have been so much longer, or devastated because eight to twelve years is still a very long time to be in Azkaban. Too long.

In Azkaban, _any_ length of time is _too long._

"Malfoy?" Granger hovers worriedly as his fingers curl over the ends of the chair arms, his head bows slightly, his eyes slip closed, and the light shines a tarnished orange through the lids. "Are you all right? Do you need me to get a Healer? Malfoy?"

Draco doesn't answer her, just breathes shallow and slow because he doesn't think he can speak without crying yet. Because the exact length of time doesn't matter, really; going back to Azkaban will be the death of Lucius Malfoy, one way or the other. His breath hitches. He doesn't want his father to die.

Then Granger's fingers press warm and firm over his where they grip the chair arm white-knuckled and twitching. Her fingers lay neatly along the cracks between his, the pressure of them all but stilling the tiny spasms, and she says his name again – full of a worry that is so kind it hurts. So kind that Draco never wants her to speak his name like that again. He pulls his hand clumsily from beneath the comfort of hers and tucks it on his lap.

"_Don't_," he says in a small voice that doesn't sound like his at all. Granger draws in a sharp breath it the sound of it and steps back fast, sitting down huddled on the edge of the chair on the other side of the window. She leans forward and hugs herself, and the afternoon light lancing into the room cuts across the side of her face. She waits for him to speak with her eyes on her trainers and her dark brows scrunched down in concern, and he hates her for so many reasons. Mostly for being the reason he is here in St Mungo's, for being the bearer of bad news, and for making him ask the next question.

"My m-mother?" Draco asks as soon as the sharp hurt in his chest has receded to the point that he can speak without his chin trembling and his eyes watering over.

"Oh – oh, god Malfoy, I'm _sorry_. I didn't – I forgot –"

"_Granger_." Desperation is raw and rough in his voice as he grinds her name out.

"She's fine," Granger says first before bothering with the details, and Draco's muddled hate toward her is overwhelmed by a wave of sudden gratitude. He presses his fist against his mouth to hide the traitorous trembling of his chin as emotion sweeps up fierce and hard, slamming inside his chest in concert with his heartbeat. "There was a great deal of debate about what her sentence should be, and the vote was…a close one. But Harry's testimony on record saying he thought she should be treated with leniency carried a great deal of weight with the Wizengamot."

"P-Potter…defended mm-my mother?"

"Yes. She saved his life, Malfoy. Perhaps only because of her fear for you, but…" Granger shrugs, and goes on. "In the end she was sentenced to two years house arrest. Her wand will have a trace placed on it that will alert the Aurors assigned to monitor her if she attempts to perform any harmful spells in the next _five _years, and she will be provided with Ministry housing for a year."

Draco tries to take her quick rattling of information in and thinks he fails, a frown carving between his brows, his trembling fingers coming up to massage his temples. He meets Granger's eyes and asks what he thinks he knows the answer to. "M-ministry housing?"

He sees the exact second that Granger's face transforms with fresh pity. "The Ministry seized the manor directly after the – the Battle of Hogwarts, Malfoy. They want to use the manor to house war orphans. They swept it for Dark artefacts, and are holding an auction to dispose of the majority of the contents in an upcoming auction."

It is a shock, despite that he should have expected it. Draco thinks of his room, of all his private, personal possessions, and it hurts. "But…th-that's my _home_," he says in that small, hopeless way, his voice breaking and cracking pathetically, and Granger buries her face in her hands with a little sound that resembles a dry sob.

"What?" he demands angrily, his chest winding tight and his eyes stinging hot with tears he doesn't want to fall. His home. His home and all his things packed up and sold to all and sundry, or tossed in the rubbish. He knows he shouldn't have expected anything else – that the Malfoys don't _deserve_ anything else, but it's his _home._

"_W-what_, Granger?" His hands make trembling, useless fists as he stares at her through the straggles of hair that fall over his eyes.

"I didn't think…" she says muffled and brutally honest into her hands. "I didn't think seeing you like this would be _so_ _hard_." She sniffs wetly and looks up at him, the truth stark on her face and spilling from her lips in a flood without thought. "You're _Malfoy_. We have always hated each other, since we were _children_. I don't even know why you _saved_ me. And I still don't like you at all, because…" She trails off and her face is miserable, and Draco waits silent and stony for her to say it. "But I – I didn't think it would be so hard to see you…"

She won't say it. So he says it for her.

"Broken?" Anger sparks a light inside him, and he gusts to fury in a moment, his voice slashing at her, jagged and accusing. "_B-broken?_ Is that w-what you mm-m-mean, Granger? So fucking – _hard,_ for you t-to see me b-broken, and damaged, and –"

"_Sad!_" She nearly yells it to cut across his ranting, and the fury burning in him is doused instantly. He snaps his mouth shut and stares at her dumbly. "Sad," Granger says again, wiping beneath each of her dark eyes with a finger that comes away with the sheen of wetness. "I didn't think it would be so awful to see you…sad. I – I'm sorry, Malfoy. I'm so very sorry."

He doesn't know what to say to that. At all.

Granger licks her lips and says, leaning forward so that her gaze drills into his: "I'm sorry that you can't see your mother. I'm sorry that your home is being sold. And while I am more grateful than I can say for what you did, I'm so very sorry that you were hurt for saving my life, Malfoy." And there is an utter truth, a total earnestness to what she says and how she looks at Draco, which makes him want to splinter into a million tiny pieces under the weight of her kindness.

Draco looks away as his leg spasms and his foot shuffles on the floor, the effect of his last dose of potions steadily wearing off. He bites his lip, every part of him telling him to lash out at her, to spurn her kindness. He _hates_ her – he can't accept… His eyes fix on his right hand as it begins to twitch more vigorously than it has been, because he can't meet Granger's gaze. "Wh-what about my father? Are you s-sorry he's going to go m-mad or die in Azkaban?"

"No," she tells him softly. "I'm not. Because he won't. Eight years is…not a long time in the wizarding world, Malfoy."

"I-i-i-it i-i-is ifff –" It takes too long for Draco to get the words out, his mind sharp and clear but his body not cooperating. Frustration boils up in him. "D-d-dem-mentors," he gets out shortly and with great effort in the end, and thank fuck Granger is not stupid, and understands.

And she smiles a little, just the tiniest upward curve to her lips.

"There aren't any, Malfoy. They've all just…gone. There hasn't been a single Dementor sighting since the war's end. And there _certainly_ aren't any at Azkaban. It's just a prison now, not a torture chamber anymore."

And that is when hope seeds in Draco's chest, because eight years in a cell Lucius Malfoy _can_ survive, and his mother will manage her restrictions because she is stronger and more capable than she appears. He smiles faintly at Granger; because he can't keep it in, because even if he hates her this is the first time since he saved her that he has felt _hope_. And _she_ is why he feels it, feels this sense that maybe things _can_ get better, that this is not all there is, and he wants to thank her.

He smiles at her through the agony that lances down both legs and up into his spine, and through the familiar, constant hatefulness, and the spasms that make his hands claw. He smiles, buoyed by the dizzying sensation of having _hope_ again, and Granger smiles back. For a moment Draco feels a sweep of pale happiness.

"Th-thank you," he says quietly, reluctant and stiff as the pain licks greedily up his spine; his thanks is not something he ever thought he'd sincerely give to Hermione Granger, and it is not easy for him to give it. And then through gritted teeth as he can bear the growing pain no longer: "P-please, can you c-call…Healer. I n-need – it _hurts_."

Granger stays sitting with him until the Healer arrives, her red blouse a vivid blur through the tears of pain that stream from his eyes, her eyes just dark smears in an ashen face. Draco wants her to go because the vulnerability is nearly worse than the pain, but she won't – she is _worried, _she says – and he can't make her.

"I hh-hate you," Draco says, his body a cage of hurt he is trapped within and she there to witness his mewling. "W-why are you even h-here?" he asks in a sob as his short-clipped nails dig deep, bloody crescents into his palms. "Do y-you _enjoy _seeing me like th-this?" he demands bitter and mindless with the pain, slumped in his chair as the agony sparks through his nerves like wildfire. "Do y-you think – I _deserve_ it?"

"It's all right, Malfoy, " Granger tells him, strained beneath a fragile veneer of calm, not responding to his bitter goading as he wants her to. "The Healer will be here soon. It won't be long." She stands and hovers helplessly in front Draco, and he stares glassily up at her through his fringe. "I have to stay," she says with a tremble to her voice as she wrings her hands together, standing over him full of useless sympathy. "To make sure you're okay. In – in case you go into convulsions. You shouldn't be alone."

Draco has lost the ability to tell her that he is _always_ alone when she is not here, convulsions or no – and he would not say it anyway. Granger might take it as an invitation to visit and he does not want to invite her. The scent of cinnamon envelops him, Granger's hand squeezing warm and smooth over his for the briefest of moments as she says in a fierce, urgent voice: "I don't enjoy this, Malfoy, not at all. And – and you don't deserve it either."

And then the door to his room swings open, and there is the purple potion tipped down his throat and the taste of aniseed on his tongue, and for a while, the world goes away.

* * *

**12 Grimmauld Place, ****Islington, London**

"That sounds dreadful, Hermione. Are you all right?" Luna asks softly as Hermione finishes relaying the events at St Mungo's yesterday afternoon in a halting, uncertain voice.

"I'm…fine, thank you Luna. It's _him_ that –" Hermione breaks off, unsure of what to say. She sits in the kitchen of Grimmauld at ten past ten in the morning with Luna and Neville, all three nursing scalding cups of tea, a lone sunbeam streaking in one of the few windows. A plate of Neville's Gran's shortbread biscuits sits on the table between them all, half of them gone already. Hermione is so thankful for her friends' company, for their attempts at light chatter and their willingness to talk of serious, difficult subjects.

It is term time of course, but Luna's father opted to not return her to Hogwarts immediately – not so soon after the terror and separation that the father and daughter had endured. Hermione doesn't think Luna would have been willing to go away and leave her father just yet, not even if he'd been happy for her to go. Hermione doesn't blame the younger witch for not going back, not when she herself hasn't returned to complete her seventh year. Schooling no longer seems as important as it had.

Death has a way of putting things into perspective.

"I feel so bad for him. I never thought – I mean, it's _Malfoy_. He was the most horrid, bigoted, _evil_ little prat at school, and during the war he hardly acquitted himself with his actions. Not until he saved me." Hermione remembers it, the images etched into her mind in blood and pain. She had been dueling Malfoy, when Bellatrix Lestrange had flung a Dark curse at her from across the room. Malfoy had seen it and inexplicably just…stepped out into the path of the curse with a _protego_ that had failed him.

"One – admittedly very good – action weighed up against so many nasty, evil ones… He's – he's not a good person. Not a friend. He was the _enemy._ I feel like I shouldn't care so much about seeing him like that. I – I feel like there's something wrong with me." Harry would think there was, Hermione thinks to herself. Harry off in Nepal, runaway from the fallout. _She_ helped him shoulder all his burdens, as much and as best as she could – always when Harry needed her, she was there. But when Hermione needs him to help her with _her_ pain and grief he is gone, halfway around the world.

If Ron was here, then… But Ron is not here, they are not a trio anymore, and with him gone, Hermione and Harry have fallen apart. They have gone down different paths in their grief.

"There's nothing wrong with you, Hermione. It's admirable that you care. Honestly." Neville says, and she looks up across the table at him, searching for reassurance in his face. She sees honesty in his eyes, comfort in the curve to his mouth, and shortbread crumbs in his stubble, and she smiles at him. She accepts Neville's truth because she wants it to be okay for her to care, and she loves him for being who he is; she thinks sometimes he is more admirable than anyone.

"You've got…" she indicates, and Neville laughs at himself as he scrubs his palms over his cheeks and jaw, and Luna sips at her tea and watches him over the cup with that sweet, otherworldly smile.

* * *

**Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions, North Side, Diagon Alley, London**

It is Hermione's turn to play the comforter today, although she is hardly in any state to do so. She feels that she is a bough bent to breaking under the weight of all her grief, and the grief of those around her. She feels like she cannot stand it any longer, but she must.

Her arms wrap tightly around Ginny, her hand soothing up and down the younger witch's back in slow, firm strokes as Hermione tries to gently shush her crying. Ginny's shoulders shake jaggedly and her sobs are wet and nasal, her face buries in the crook of Hermione's neck and wets her collar. Hermione is crying too, but quietly, the tears running down her face like rain. The plain robes Ginny is having taken in will be damp with saltwater by the time they are done, but Madam Malkin says not a word, just conjures a box of tissues and withdraws discreetly.

The seamstress must be used to it by now, used to the people coming apart to sudden shattered pieces in her fitting room. The windows of her shop are taken up with mannequins draped in tasteful funereal garb; the funerals have been taking place in a steady stream since a week after the war ended. Diagon Alley was vibrant with the trappings of joyous festivity for several days after the Battle of Hogwarts as people celebrated Voldemort's death. And then the reality of the toll it had taken in lives had sunk in, and the decorations had – for good or for ill – been replaced with the signs of mourning as wizarding Britain grieved.

It is morbid, Hermione thinks to herself as she draws Ginny tighter to herself, rocking them both gently. It is morbid and depressing, and entirely fitting.

"It's not _fair_," Ginny chokes on a rushing inhale, before her breath judders back out. She feels so thin, her spine a row of knobs under her funeral robes; the reason that they are here, because all Ginny's clothes hang off the girl now. Grief has robbed Ginny of her appetite, and Molly Weasley worries but there isn't anything she can do. "It's not _fair_. I _hate_ him. I _hate_ him for doing it. How _could_ he?"

"I don't know," Hermione says numbly through her tears, feeling leaden and slow, a coldness seeping throughout her that makes everything seem distant. Dean Thomas killed himself three days ago, and nobody knows _why_.

"How could he just _throw_ his life away like that, when I would give _anything_ to have R-Ron and Fred back?" Ginny sobs, furious and hurting, and Hermione can't say anything to that because her throat is stoppered by a sharp lump of emotion that will not be dislodged. She shrugs helplessly instead, and buries her face in the fall of Ginny's long red hair, crying for Ron and Fred, for Ginny, for Dean, for Malfoy, for herself, and for everyone else who died or survived, or hurts so badly that sometimes they would rather die than live.

* * *

**Reviews very much appreciated :3 **_Thank you for reading! Liss xx_


	3. Three

**Author's Note: **Thank you all for being so patient with my snail's pace writing at the moment! And also thank you for reading, following, favouriting, and reviewing. You're all amazing :3

* * *

۞ **Part Three** ۞

**12 Grimmauld Place, Islington, London**

It is a Sunday morning that hangs on tenterhooks of waiting in No. 12 Grimmauld Place; tension slowly thickening the atmosphere. The tall townhouse is hollow, quiet; a sense of restless melancholy trapped within its walls. Hermione sits in the drawing room alone, in camisole and stripy pyjama trousers. A book rests in her lap and a cup of tea sits untouched on the end table beside her armchair – accompanied by several of Mrs Weasley's shortbread biscuits on a saucer.

Hermione's fingers strum idly on the pages of the book as she gazes sightlessly out the one tiny window set in the wall opposite. Grimmauld is not known for an overabundance of windows – it is a dismal, poky place overall, and Hermione finds that suits her mood. She can't seem to concentrate to read this morning, the words scattering on the paper like frightened mice. There is a glimpse of cloudless blue sky through the small, square windowpane, sun bathing a long rectangle of floor before the window. It is a beautiful autumn morning; the sort with deliciously warm sun and crisply fresh air.

It is not a day, Hermione thinks, to be sitting inside, lonely and restless. There are things she could be doing, today. She could be doing _anything_ but stagnating in this dreary room alone, with grief hovering ready to fall upon her with long claws. One thing in particular has niggled at the corners of Hermione's mind all morning despite her best attempts to put it from her head, and now she finally capitulates to it. She stands and tosses her book carelessly down on the seat of the ancient armchair, traversing the silent house in slippered feet.

She feels like a ghost as she steps light and quick up the stairway, while Ron seems so painfully alive, and Harry so close by. She is translucent and pale; barely there, and the memories are vibrant and strong, bursting into life in her mind's eye and making her vision waver with tears. Grimmauld is keeper of too many memories and it isn't healthy to be so wrapped up in what has gone…but Hermione cannot bear to be apart from them. Not yet.

Unlike Harry who ran halfway around the world to get away from the pain of being surrounded by loss and empty spaces, she clings to them. She belongs here with Sirius, and Remus and Tonks, and Fred, and _Ron_, sitting at the table by herself in silence, where they all once sat together in noise and chaos. Breathing in the remnants of Ron's scent from a jersey he left in an upstairs bedroom. They are all around her here, and it hurts but it is better than feeling nothing at all.

Besides, she has nowhere else to go. Her parents sold the house when they immigrated to Australia.

The sun pours liquid gold into her upstairs bedroom, and her small windows are thrown wide open, welcoming it in. It makes her feel lighter – more substantial – to stand there a moment and feel the breeze on her face and be bathed in the sunlight. She had left the room in curtained gloom this morning.

"Thank you, Kreacher," Hermione says softly to herself and smiles. Then to business; nervous tension falling over her. Her neat, summery dress is crisp on her skin, the hem whisking about her calves as she slips her sensible heels on. It takes a good deal of effort to beat her hair into submission; enough that she has time to seriously question this daft mission.

Her heart is sitting tight and quick in her chest, her pulse flutters fast at her wrists where she dabs perfume. This is foolish.

"Stupid," she says to her reflection in the charmed mirror. "Ridiculous." Her mirror-self – in white dress and unfashionable low-heeled brown shoes with her tamed hair pinned back at the sides – merely smiles mysteriously, before wandering out of view. "Not helpful," Hermione mutters, turning away. Her shoes click on the floor as she hurries out to the stairwell, wand in hand and purse dangling at her wrist.

"I'm going out, Kreacher! I'll be back this afternoon!" she calls down, even though she is sure he already knows, somehow. And then she swallows hard and spins on the spot, skirt snapping about her calves, nearly certain she is making a mistake.

She cracks into existence before a large set of wide-open gates, shaking faintly from nausea and something more. She stares at the gateway, feet rooted to the spot, fingers flexing around the wood of her wand. Her vision is swallowed up by the mammoth building standing at the end of the long, immaculate drive.

The sun shines down hot on her head, and the breeze whisks cool at her back. Hermione takes a deep breath and walks through the gates, tension radiating down her spine. She is as fearful of the memories conjured by this place as she is perversely possessive of the ones at Grimmauld. But the manor looks different as she crunches down the drive toward it; cleaner and brighter, nearly free of the stench of Dark magic.

She could almost forget.

A polite wizard who looks about a decade older than her is at the doorway with an eager salesman's smile, and a pile of scrolls on a small table beside him. His expression becomes fawning when he sees who she is, and Hermione cringes inwardly.

"…_The _Hermione Granger?" he gushes when she reluctantly confirms her name at his nervous initial query. She nods absently, stepping inside onto the white marble floor of the spacious foyer and turning in a slow circle. The chandelier glistens above, dripping with crystals that catch and shatter the light, and a grand staircase sweeps up at both the left and right to the first floor.

It looks entirely different when walking in of one's own free will, instead of being dragged in, filthy and bloodied and certain of death. Hermione's hands shake and she tries to hide it, clutching her wand too tight for comfort.

"…An honour, Miss Granger, a genuine honour! You're a hero, to us all…" The wizard – a man Hermione can just _tell_ never fought – is rambling on, and she bites back a sharp, bitter jab. She dislikes being lauded a hero, and utterly despises it when it comes from people who were too cowardly to risk their own lives. But over the past weeks she has learnt the easiest way to respond; a faint, cool smile, a quiet demurral, and a redirect.

"Thank you – but those who gave their lives are the real heroes, Mr…?"

"Clifton. Atticus Clifton, Miss Granger."

"I'm here for the auction this afternoon, Atticus," she says lightly, the chill of the sunless foyer sinking into her flesh. Goosebumps rise on her bare arms, and her free hand bunches up in the skirt of her dress – other hand still holding her wand so tight her fingers are cramping. "I'm interested in some quite particular items. Who would I speak to about whether they're available…?"

"Mr Thorsby is in charge of the auction, if you need assistance – he'll most likely be upstairs. The scroll has a map that can locate him for you. It also itemises everything that will be put up at auction today," Atticus Clifton plucks up a scroll from the pile beside him and holds it out to her with a small, nervous bow. "Just ask the scroll if what you're interested in is available, and if it is, it will list the available items in detail."

"Thank you, Atticus," she tells him, taking the scroll and unrolling it as she nods a polite goodbye to the fawning wizard. "Please show me where Mr Thorsby is," she requests quietly of the charmed scroll as she clicks away from Atticus, and follows the map's directions up the grand staircase to the first floor. The manor is big and ominous as she makes her way through it, and although Hermione knows it is safe chills run down her spine, and tension makes her steps stiff and stilted. She keeps looking over her shoulder.

Why is she doing this? For _him? Why? _Because of the way Malfoy's voice had shivered and gone ragged with emotion when he'd spoken of this place, nearly a week ago now. Because of how his shoulders had slumped, the way he had seemed so broken? Yes. _Yes_, she tells herself, this is why she is doing all this – daring to walk through this horrible place, chased by ghosts every step. Because she feels sorry for Malfoy – she _owes_ him – and because the world is drenched in too much sorrow, and if she can ease someone's pain then she _will_. Even if it is Malfoy's pain; something she had found surprisingly hard to bear, when she had seen it traced sharp and raw over his features. And even this ordeal is better than sitting alone in Grimmauld, letting herself drown in memories and her own bitter grief.

Hermione turns a corner, and another corridor stretches out ahead of her; paintings decorating the silk wallpapered walls, a lush antique rug running the length of it, and a good dozen doors set at irregular intervals. There are ornaments on end table here and there that look shockingly expensive, and the sconces that glow brightly look to be covered in gold leaf. It has an air of ostentatious grandeur, and very little lingering taint of Dark magic; the map the scroll displays tells her in flowing cursive that this is the family's private wing, and the doors mostly open into bedrooms. She still holds her wand very tightly, but her shoulders unwind a little.

Mr Thorsby's dot is marked inside the large room at the very end; the master bedroom. It is luxurious to a fault and decorated in rich, dark tones; traditional pureblood interior design taste, it seems, from Hermione's rather limited experience. The auctioneer – an older wizard in dated formal robes – is fussing with a scenic painting and glances up at Hermione as she enters cautiously, with her heart drumming quick and hard. Like Mr Clifton, Mr Thorsby recognises her immediately, and is at once at her service.

"The…the family's personal possessions. What is being done with them?" she asks, feeling exposed just by asking such a strange thing. Thankfully – perhaps being that she is Hermione Granger – Mr Thorsby questions nothing, despite an obvious curiosity. He just bobs his head with a subservience that makes Hermione uncomfortable, and answers her simply.

"The valuable personal items, such as Mrs Malfoy's jewellery, are being sold off in the auction. You'll find them listed on the scroll amongst the household chattels and so on. The rest is to be simply…disposed of, after the auction when the house is cleaned for occupancy. The Ministry did not indicate they cared what happened to the family's un-saleable belongings."

"Did Mrs Malfoy not wish to take any, er, keepsakes with her?" Hermione asks as she scrumples the neat scroll in her hands with absentminded nervousness. "Or do you not know?"

"She wasn't allowed to take much with her when she left, from what _I_ heard." Mr Thorsby's tone is gossipy, and he leans in toward her a little as he lowers his voice. "She took a _few_ things I believe, but I _heard_ that the Aurors only allowed her to fill a single suitcase. Quite the comedown, for the great lady of the manor – reduced to only the barest necessities." The auctioneer makes a satisfied little sound, his small mouth quirking into a smile brimming with schadenfreude. Hermione's mouth flattens into a thin taut line of disapproval; as much as the Malfoys deserve punishment, kicking someone when they are down leaves a bad taste in her mouth. It isn't right.

"Well, given that no one cares what happens to these un-saleable items, no one should have any problem with me taking possession of them," Hermione says firmly and crisply, before she can lose the courage. Mr Thorsby's face scrunches with utter bewilderment as he tries to process her statement. She understands just how strange it sounds, how unexpected, but embarrassment and annoyance prickle at her as the awkward moment stretches on and _on_. "Well?" she prods.

"You…you want their personal things? Like…?" The staid, middle-aged wizard stares at Hermione blankly, his voice trailing away in confusion, waiting for her to explain herself further. She clenches her jaw, feeling heat creep up her neck to flush her cheeks pink.

"I…photographs? Erm, sentimental things, I suppose?"

"…The – the whole family's?" She can sense the _'why?' _hovering on the auctioneer's lips.

"Well, no… Mostly…just Draco Malfoy's. Actually."

A silence falls. Mr Thorsby's eyes rake over Hermione in a way that makes her feel dirty, and it takes her a stupid handful of heartbeats to realise what the wizard is thinking. That she and Malfoy are… _oh god._ It is a sordid, ridiculous thought that makes her face blaze with heat, a reaction which probably only solidifies Mr Thorsby's suspicions. But she refuses to explain herself; it is no one's business why she wishes to have Draco Malfoy's things, and she doesn't care what this random wizard might foolishly – _horrifyingly_ – assume.

She lifts her chin and stares the middle-aged wizard down with a cool expression and tone that is belied by her flaming cheeks. "_Well? _Where exactly would I find these things?"

And just a short time later, after Mr Thorsby has checked that it is all right for her to take what she likes, he leads her down the hall to Malfoy's bedroom.

It is light and airy in comparison to the other rooms so far, and with a shock Hermione realises she is seeing his personal taste, and it is totally unlike she thought it would be. The silk wallpaper is the same opulent, dark paisley, but the floor is bare of the luxurious rugs, the furniture is antique but of warm, light wood, and the whole feel of the room is different.

The windows have no curtains and the sun streams in throughout the room as it has nowhere else in the manor. She almost feels like she can breathe staring in at it, the iron band around her chest loosening, the fog of fear that clogs up her lungs beginning to dissipate.

The bedding on the four-poster is snowy white, and a lamp burns with a soft steady glow on the bedside table, even though it is nearly lunchtime. A well-cared-for broomstick leans up against a dresser, and the corner of what looks like Slytherin Quidditch Seeker robes peek out a half-open drawer nearby. There are small trinkets and framed pictures of Malfoy and his parents scattered sparingly over surfaces, and a number of non-fiction books by notable wizarding authors stacked in small piles here and there - on dressers, and nearly covering a desk.

Wizarding pictures are magically stuck to a rectangular section of wall over the desk, and multiple versions of Malfoy and his old pureblood friends are waving or smirking at the camera. Some of them are dead now, some have disappeared, but Hermione knows that none of them could be as happy, as they are in these sun-caught old photos. It feels wrong to step over the threshold, as she stands there looking in. As though she is violating him.

And then on the polished floorboards, Hermione sees splashes that faintly discolour the wood. It is stained with old blood that won't scrub out; she knows the look of it without even having to ask the auctioneer who hovers behind her. The blood stains lead in drizzles and splatters from beneath the hall rug that edges the threshold she stands in – she takes a sharp step back – to the centre of the room, and stops there, becoming a larger stain. As though someone has staggered in the doorway where she stands and collapsed on the floor.

She swallows hard and presses her hand to her stomach, feeling ill. Is it Malfoy's blood? Or someone else's? She isn't sure which thought she flinches from more, and her vision dances with dots as she sucks in short, ragged breaths too quickly as she stares at the stain. It is stupid to worry because it is _past_ and it is _over _no matter what happened, but Hermione cannot help it. She can't just _let go_. Her brain stutters on the same thoughts, over and over, round and round, and her palms are sweating, her skin clammy. Was Malfoy hurt by someone, or was it someone he hurt? Did someone seek shelter here? Did…

"Miss Granger? Are you all right?" Mr Thorsby asks worriedly, and she gets a firm hold of herself, giving herself a mental shake and nodding once at the concerned auctioneer.

"I – I'm fine. I just…never mind," she says weakly, and straightens her shoulders, turning to offer him a smile that feels false on her lips. "I'm quite all right. You can leave me to it now, thank you."

Hermione sees it all as she goes through Draco Malfoy's possessions carefully; so many little pieces of him. They are laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, and while she knows there are a great many missing, she thinks there are enough to catch a _glimpse_. She is gaining small, true glints of what lies beneath, and even if she does not have enough pieces to make sense of what exactly the pieces make, it is fascinating still_. _She is become a voyeur, picking through Malfoy's own _bedroom_, his most private place, and it is the strangest feeling she has ever experienced – equal parts uncomfortable and oddly _thrilling_.

She transfigures the scroll Atticus gave her into a sturdy cardboard box large enough to hold comfortably in her arms, and puts the photos in first, plucked off the wall one by one. The wall begins with a gangly seven or eight year old Malfoy, grinning widely with his arm slung around Blaise Zabini, eager and innocent still. The years stretch out, and Hermione feels as though she is actually watching him age as she pulls each picture down. The latest photo is still an older one; Malfoy is a sulky looking fifteen year old lounging on his bed while Pansy snuggles up close to him, her arm extended to take the picture. He scowls at her at first, but when she flashes him a pout he relents and kisses her cheek, before half-smiling at the camera. It loops over and over.

Parkinson has gone to Italy permanently, the last Hermione heard, with Zabini. There had been no reason for the pureblood to stay in Britain – not with half her friends imprisoned, and her family dead. And Zabini – one of the few of Draco's friends who had survived the war unscathed – had family ties in Italy. Hermione knows that Parkinson did not attempt to see Malfoy before she left, and Hermione finds herself wondering who had really ended their relationship, and whether Malfoy missed the pureblood witch at all.

Hermione puts the family photos into the box without looking at them too closely. They are mostly of Malfoy before the age of five, often with his parents, and the sight of Lucius Malfoy gives her the creeps. It is too strange to see the Death Eater happy and young in the oldest family photos with his arm around Narcissa, who smiles serenely, holding a chubby toddler who will one day spend his days alone in the Janus Thickey Ward, choking on potions – barely able to walk, or even speak properly. Drugged into incoherency, or shaking and twitching as pain and convulsions seethe through him, courtesy of the unknown curse his aunt struck him down with, and the Cruciatus Curse she had tortured him with first.

A terrible sadness sweeps over Hermione as she places the heavy-framed photographs carefully into the box, and she feels immediately guilty for it, because at least Malfoy is alive, unlike so many others. Unlike Ron. Fred. Dean. Remus and Tonks. So many more that it hurts just to think about it.

Hermione's sadness swells and expands to encompass everyone – the whole great swathe of suffering and hurt that blankets the entire wizarding world like a shroud, a funeral veil. It is all so unbearable. Her eyes stay painfully dry, but her chest goes tight and aching inside, like her muscles are being drawn up and tied into a knot over her heart.

She feels herself breathe in and out mechanically, feeling distant, floating far away and only anchored to reality by a thread snagged on a twig; she is learning that this mental distance is the only way to avoid the floods of raw, ugly tears that try to crash upon her periodically.

Hermione moves about silently as she places trinkets and other odd bits and bobs into the box, layering the things with clothing; to make sure that nothing breaks, and because she knows he has no clothing of his own. He has so little of anything. It is too easy to be kind to him; the odd scrap of thought rises in the murk of her mind, and then sinks away again as she keeps steadily drifting through the sunlit room, picking over his belongings with magpie curiosity. Eventually, she begins to come across the _other_ pieces of Malfoy's life.

There are books on Dark magic mixed in with the books by notable authors that she herself would read. There are a few items of bloodstained clothing balled up and stuffed in the bottom of his wardrobe like a shameful secret, and she wonders why he didn't scourgify them. Did the sight of blood sicken him? A spatter of it catches her eye on a mirror; three droplets, dried to darkness, and she wonders again; whose blood, and what was the cause of its spilling? Something inflicted on another person in screaming and fear, or just a common, ordinary accident?

Several illegal potions ingredients only needed for Dark purposes sit in preserving jars in his bottom bedside drawer – the other bottom bedside drawer holds, of all things, Muggle lad mags. That startles a laugh from her lips, but it sounds sharp and too-loud in the silence. The magazines are hidden beneath a stack of garish illustrations, of what Hermione assumes are Muggles, dying in various gory ways – all the macabre parchments signed at the bottom with a 'BL'. Her skin crawls and she feels suddenly icy cold despite the warmth of the sun flooding in through the stark, curtain-less windows.

Hermione doesn't put any of these things in the half-full box that she places gently on the white bedcovers.

She stands with hands on her hips, staring around the room, having gathered up most of his sentimental items now. Malfoy owned pitifully few personal possessions, really – and she thinks that perhaps that must make the few things he has even _more_ precious to him.

A small stack of letters and cards from friends, several books, photographs, trophies, some battered journals that appear to be diaries – the words scrambled by a charm she doesn't attempt to remove, a few odd little trinkets… On impulse, she hurries across the room and snatches up his broom in both hands. The wood is polished to silkiness and warm from the sun in her hands, and it fairly vibrates with magic. She lays it across the top of the box – Harry told her once that it isn't good to shrink brooms down. Ruins the magic.

She misses him like a hole clean through her chest, all the more because Ron – a sob catches in her throat – Ron isn't here to make up for Harry's absence. She hopes, with a tension swelling in her and an edge of bitterness to her thoughts, that Harry is finding what he needs to, without her in his monastery in Nepal. She had asked if she could visit him, when he'd gone, and he had said, _'maybe'_. She wishes he had just told her the truth.

Hermione tells herself that he has left Ginny too, and of the two of them _Ginny_ should have more right to be upset that her boyfriend has gone, but Ginny is kept busy by her attendance at Hogwarts. By rebuilding and classes and survivors all around her…and Hermione has friends to visit her, but eventually the visits end and she is left alone in the hollow grief of Grimmauld, with only Kreacher, Mrs Black, and her memories for company.

It is driving her to madness. It has driven her _here_, to this moment, standing in the remnants of Malfoy's life, saving his belongings from their consignment to the rubbish heap. It has driven her to brave the Malfoy Manor despite her memories and her fear of this horrible place. She tells herself that surely it is a good thing to be kind – even if it is Malfoy, and it feels all strange and upside down. She tells herself that surely it is better to have been here rather than to have spent the day sitting alone in Grimmauld, losing herself to the daydreams of memory. Hermione will be glad to leave the manor, though – here there is danger of losing herself to the _wrong_ kind of memories. The broom she tucks under her arm, the box she conjures a handle for, not wanting to shrink it in case doing so damages anything.

No matter what she tries, the lamp on Malfoy's bedside table won't turn off, so she leaves it on when she goes, shutting the door behind her with a quiet click.

**Room 7, Janus Thickey Ward, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

There is a new Healer, who works the day shifts.

Draco isn't sure how long it has been since the witch started; the days have all become one long streak of confused pain and indignity. He thinks it was only a few days after Granger visited, although now he isn't sure if she really visited, or if he imagined it. But why would he imagine Granger?

He wishes she would visit, because no one does, no one can come except for her, no one would _want _to come except for her. And no one else will believe him, or care. She would care. He knows it.

Unless it all happened in his head, and she is just a figment – a - a figment he created.

The night Healer gives Draco his sedative potion like always, but she must know that the day Healer won't give him his other potions; just _laughs _at him, and tips his potion out onto the floor, and _hurts _him sometimes, even. But the night Healer never says a word about that.

She doesn't care that the day Healer hurts him. Because Draco _should_ suffer. Because he _deserves_ it. That's what the day Healer tells him, when she tips out his potion and laughs at the miserable hopelessness on his face. Because her sister died at Lucius Malfoy's hands, so now Draco will suffer at hers.

He can't argue with her logic, Draco thinks with a manic madness edging along his thoughts. It is the taking of an eye for an eye, and it is not a foreign concept to the pureblood families, who favour it themselves. He does not know to fault her for doing it. He was raised to it; to hard justice without mercy, except where galleons could purchase leniency, and then justice was a one-sided blade that the rich wielded against the poor.

So Draco understands; he simply wishes that the woman would damn well kill him if she wants her revenge, because he is sick of all the _hurting_.

Everything is so fucked up, and the pain won't stop except for those times that he loses himself to the sedatives that he gets at night. When sleep it comes it catches him unawares, and drags him down into restless nightmares with greedy teeth and claws, that savage him all night and leave him waking in the morning with tears dried on his cheeks.

He thinks he has started to hallucinate sometimes, maybe because of the pain, or maybe he's just gone insane. Because he can see Pansy right now, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. She is pouting, an arch little twist to it, a lift to her eyebrow as she sees him there, sitting on the floor. She is a comfort to look at as she stares down at him, for all that she is a pert little bitch under the surface, and he reaches out to her.

"P-p-pa-ansy," he stutters brokenly, hoarsely, and her eyes widen with horror, sweep over him as if she is only just now seeing him as he is. Damaged by the curse. _Useless_. He can't even walk anymore; the tremors are too bad. He spends his days in the bathroom, so he doesn't have to crawl and fall his way to the loo, fighting through the convulsions. He gropes for her desperately, no longer aware of whether she is hallucination or not, just thinking of warm summer days with his head resting in her lap, her endless chatter, her skilful little fingers. When they were happy. "P-pansy…"

She is there, and then – _blink_ – she is gone leaving only an empty doorway as an arc of pain snaps up Draco's left leg, through his back to his shoulder and then radiating along his spine. Through his limbs, every one. It spreads throughout him fast, snapping and cracking. A giant squid sinking its hooked suckers into him, dragging him under, and his limbs draw up close as his muscles tighten and contract. He tips to one side helplessly.

"N-nno," he whispers on a desperate breath, but his body does not listen to his pleas. It isn't his to command, anymore. It has betrayed him.

Draco shudders on the floor in his cold corner of the bathroom, shaking, tendons standing out in cords on his neck, jaw clenched, tears seeping from beneath his closed eyelids. It doesn't matter that he is a mere two feet away from the toilet; his bladder lets go and somewhere in his pain he is aware enough to feel hot, horrible shame. The spasms jerk through him relentlessly, the old blood from where he has bitten his tongue all the times before encrusted on his chin, the new blood running over down it. It drips on the tiles.

He wishes Granger would come.

She told him…

Blood drips on the tiles.

His hands make claws.

…he doesn't deserve this.

He needs to hear her say it again, right now.

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**Please leave a comment if you enjoyed it!** I love getting your feedback :D


	4. Four

**Author's Note: **I need less of a life, so I can write more :\ Sorry this has been so long in coming! Life has been...not conducive to writing, lately. Thank you so much to all my lovely readers - I less than three you all. Now on with the story...

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**Part Four**

**12 Grimmauld Place, Islington, London**

Hermione knows the moment his gaze alights on the creased and faded photo of a much younger Malfoy and Parkinson, poking out of the top of the box; she went through it last night against her own better sense, and the contents are somewhat muddled now. She can see realisation dawning on his face, but it doesn't alleviate his obvious bewilderment. Her stomach slowly sinks; a sort of weary resignation settling in; she doesn't want to discuss this. It has been three days and she has been balancing on a knife edge over whether to take Malfoy's things to him or just…store them for him, until… She doesn't know. The issue is a sore spot, an ulcer that she has spent three days and four nights probing with her tongue, and it has not healed; she still has no idea what she should do.

And now there will be questions, which she does not have the answers for. Why didn't she put the box away in a spare wardrobe? Confusion clouds Neville's eyes and he turns to her, sharp face and sharp voice, and a puzzled worry seated in his eyes. At least there is no anger, like so many others would seethe up with. The air is caught with rich notes of coffee and the heady scent of violets, and Hermione breathes it in slow and deep, trying to be still and calm. It is ridiculous that she should be on the verge of tears, but she is so fragile these days.

"Hermione, what are these?" He crosses the kitchen to the box she has left on a stool in one dim corner, and plucks up the photograph, the space between his brows cutting with deep creases as he frowns. "What..?" He flips the box fully open as she stands there uselessly, frozen to the spot with the mug of coffee she has just made for him clutched in her two hands. She stares, feeling stupidly _caught_ as he picks carefully through the box's contents, reminding her oddly – achingly – of Remus in the argyle cardigan that his Nan probably bought him.

"Neville, I…"

"Are these _Malfoy's_ things?" His voice goes up at the end as he pulls out a framed picture of Lucius, Narcissa, and Draco Malfoy – _Draco, age three_ – is scribbled in a flowery hand on a label pasted to the back of the frame. Neville glances sharply again at Hermione. "They _are._ Why have you…?"

She swallows hard, throat clicking dryly.

"I…" She feels accused of some wrong, and it is stupid and she shouldn't feel that way. There is nothing wrong in what she has done; Harry might think so, but Neville isn't Harry. She struggles to find words. His eyes are kind and curious, free of anything but a generous friendship.

"Yes, Hermione?" Neville encourages reassuringly, and a faint smile flickers insubstantial at her lips – god, he is such a good friend – before being snuffed out as his hand dips back into the box.

"Those are private, Neville. I'm sure Malfoy wouldn't want you to – well, please don't…rummage." Hermione's voice is brittle and dry as autumn leaves, quiet but clear in the silence of the room. She half expects an argument, or at least an offended remark, but Neville just apologises with an awkward smile and wanders back over to her.

"So. You have Malfoy's things," he says curiously, stopping just a step away, and his hand brushes over the backs of her fingers as he takes his coffee mug from her. Her hand is cold and trembly in comparison to his. They sit down across from each other at the scarred wood table, a little coffee sloshing over the sides of Hermione's mug in her numbed clumsiness. The sun shines a narrow beam between them, falling over the long table and the posy of violets Kreacher had set toward this end.

"I went to the auction on Sunday. At the Manor?" she begins, hands occupying themselves nervously with her mug, eyes sweeping up to Neville. He nods for her to go on. "When I went to visit Malfoy, and told him about the Manor and the auction, he was…crushed. So terribly upset. And it would be awful, wouldn't it, Neville? Losing so much?" It is a stupid question to ask, considering, but she does anyway and it hangs in the air with the light-caught dust motes. She and Neville both know intimately what it is like to experience loss; great swathes of it tearing through their lives. He sips and swallows a mouthful of coffee before answering her, taking his time as she watches him over the rim of her mug. What he says, in the end, is carefully measured.

"It is awful, isn't it, Hermione?" His eyes are soft and understanding, searching over hers as his pointer and index fingers absently trace over a lopsided heart carved into the table, quite possibly by someone who is dead now.

Her lips twitch and then flatten hard. Tears prickle behind her eyes and she bites into the side of her tongue, the pain chasing back the things she doesn't want to feel. Neville has spoken a lot to her in the last few weeks about feeling your emotions, accepting them, working through them – letting go. But Hermione isn't ready to take out her grief and examine it yet; she keeps it tucked to her heart, precious and raw.

"And I suppose it stuck in my head. Seeing him like that. And I owe him for saving me, and I didn't think it could hurt to be kind and so I – I impulsively decided to go to the auction," she says swiftly and crisply, as though Neville hadn't spoken. Her voice is a little uneven, and she blinks hard. "I went there, and I told the auctioneer I wanted all Draco Malfoy's personal things." She laughs, weak and watery. "I think he's under the impression I'm having some sordid affair with Malfoy, now."

Neville smiles at that, lopsided amusement coasting over his open features; easy and relaxed and present in the moment. Fully there, without a thought to the grief that she knows he _does_ feel, in moments when something reminds him too strongly of the people they've lost. But he always seems to be in control, and he never lets it drown him the way her grief drowns her. She is envious. Neville's grief is a still, deep well; Hermione's is the wild crash of surf that drags her under, leaving her gasping for a single breath, lungs aching, struggling and failing. _Drowning._

"So, the auction was Sunday," Neville begins by stating the obvious, and Hermione inclines her head in slightly suspicious acknowledgement. "And it's _Thursday_ today."

"Yes…?" Hermione shifts in her seat uncomfortably. She feels like Neville is leading her somewhere, and she isn't certain if she will like _where._

"Why haven't you given him the box yet, Hermione?" Neville tilts his head in curiosity, folding his arms across his chest – carefully so that his mostly-full coffee mug doesn't slop over the sides.

That is the place she didn't want to go. _Doesn't _want to go. But it is very hard to refuse Neville; dear, kind Neville, who comes to visit her almost every second day, who lets her cry on his shoulder and never tells her she needs to pull herself together, as so many others do.

"I don't know," she says small, staring down into her drink – milky-dark and sweet. She wishes it were tea, with leaves she could read. At this point she would be willing to clutch at the straws of fortune-telling to make a decision that feels right. "I – I owe Malfoy, Neville. But how much do I owe Ron? Or – or even Harry? I want to do the right thing."

"Why did you save his things if you weren't going to give them back?" Neville asked after a leisurely sip of his coffee, his tone and his face still gentle and undemanding. Hermione shrugs a shoulder, the sun falling warm over her hands and forearms as she pushes her mug around in little arcs and circles over the tabletop. _Grrick, crrerk, grrick_ – the bottom ring of the cup scrapes on the wood, the sound running little tingles down Hermione's spine and setting her teeth on edge, nearly like fingernails down a blackboard. She stops and looks back up at Neville.

"I thought that – that at the least there would always be the _option_, then. If I took his things. I can – I can store them as long as I need to." Hermione swallows hard, not sure why she feels a little frantic and wide-eyed as she tries to explain. "If I left them, that would be it. The end. Now – now I can give them to Malfoy, or keep them, or give them to Narcissa…" Her back feels cold in the shadow and her arms too warm. "I have options."

Neville nods and his eyes turn thoughtful. "I can understand that, Hermione. Everyone likes having options." She smiles and nods, sagging in her seat a bit as though she has just passed a test. Her smile is weak but filled with a silly relief.

"But…" he begins, and she bites her lip and tenses again, waits anxiously for what the cardigan-clad boy – _man_ – opposite her is going to say next, on tenterhooks. When, she wonders, sitting in the slim cast of light through the kitchen's lone pair of windows, dust motes dancing in the beam, did Neville Longbottom become her therapist? "Why does what you might owe Ron or Harry – and I can tell you now it's _nothing_ because friends don't have ledgers of debt like that – have to do with Malfoy?"

Hermione feels too vulnerable, but she is honest because it is hard _not _to be with Neville looking at her like that. "I know Harry would think it a betrayal of Ron and – and everyone else – for me to be kind to Malfoy. And if Ron were…_alive_ –" The word squeezes from her throat. "– He would be so _angry_ and hurt. You know how sensitive he w-was." She tries to wobble a smile and only ends up letting out a weepy sniffle – chin trembling and lips pressing together hard as she tries to hold in the tears that want to come bubbling out from her. It feels so _wrong_ to say 'was' about Ron.

Neville reaches across the table, and his hand is warm on hers, engulfing her smaller one and stilling its nervous little fidgets. His eyes are a wellspring of compassion, and Hermione looks down at the table because it is too much, and little drops of saltwater go _split-splat_ on the wood, staining little dark splotches. She didn't want to do this. She has been trying to get a grip, to take hold of herself, and pull herself together – all those terrible, practical sentiments, and _this_ is not conducive to _that._ "I know. But Ron wasn't always right either, Hermione. Just because he might have gotten all shirty and annoyed over you being kind to Malfoy, doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do."

He's right, but it still feels like perhaps it would be a betrayal. "But Harry…" she says weakly, and Neville's face hardens ever so slightly. They have all felt the loss of Harry, everyone in the wizarding world, to one degree or another – whether the lack of a morale-boosting figurehead to rally around and celebrate, or the lack of a loved one.

"How will Harry find out?" he asks Hermione as he squeezes her hand and releases it with his trademark lopsided little grin – weaker and more strained than usual. Hermione blinks; between his words and his tone, Neville sounds _critical_, something he rarely is. "How will he know if you don't tell him? And even if he does find out…well, we all find our healing differently." Neville's tone softens and he rubs at his forehead with the side of his hand, sighing. "If Harry can go find his healing in a monastery in Nepal, then why can't you find yours in Draco Malfoy?"

"I…" Hermione blinks at him, wanting to deny that, because she isn't finding her healing in Draco Malfoy. That would be ridiculous – that _is_ ridiculous. "I'm _not_."

"Okay, Hermione. You're not. But there's nothing wrong in it if you were. Everybody heals in different ways. Ginny – Ginny is trying to put the pain behind her already, and move on. Focused on rebuilding, focused on the future. She doesn't want to _remember_. Luna's –"

"Going to write a book on all the fallen heroes," Hermione fills in, in a whisper. "She told me."

"And Seamus has left the wizarding world altogether, now. Did you know?"

It hits her hard, like a punch in the gut and the tears she had stemmed prickle sharp again in her eyes. "No, no I hadn't heard." Her lips wobble and she sniffs hard, wiping beneath her eyes with her fingers. "Because of Dean?" He had cried so hard at Dean's funeral; a wreck, telling everyone attending that he hadn't _known_, that Dean had seemed _okay_, that the night before, everything had been the best it had been since the war ended, and Seamus had thought Dean was getting better. Past the survivor's guilt.

And then he'd woken up in the morning to find Dean hanging from the shower rail, dead for hours, with a note that said _sorry _and more besides, but would never, ever be able to say _enough_ – for Seamus, or anyone else who had loved Dean. For everyone who had stared down at Dean's coffin as it descended into the cold, hard earth, and thought _why_, and _why now_, and _but it was getting better_, and _we're sorry, we didn't realize_. Hermione had stared at Dean's coffin with her hand snared tight in Ginny's – who had wept hard, her eyes filled with memories of when she and Dean had been younger, and more innocent. She had stared and thought, _if only_. She hadn't cried until later, but there had been a lump in her throat like a rock shoved there, painful to swallow around, and her fingers had been numb and stiff from holding Ginny's hand. She had owled Harry, but he hadn't come. She didn't know if he'd even gotten the letter.

"I think so." Neville nods just barely, his own eyes looking dark with wetness. Their hands slide together again, fingers interlocking. "He says he wants to go to a Muggle university."

"Seamus? Really?"

"I know. I would never have expected it either. But he seemed…hopeful, last I talked to him. And he said he wants to keep in touch, by the way. But my point is, Hermione, if helping Malfoy gives you something to focus on – if it helps you get through – then that's okay."

Hermione stares at one of her best friend's across the table, her gaze searching his for any hint of judgment, or a lie. She finds none, and it takes her a moment but she nods and smiles, drawing her hand away from his and cradling up her coffee. A deep, slow inhale of air into her lungs, ballooning her up, and then the slow-mellow sink of letting it out again, and she steadies. The sun splays over her up to her shoulder now; sinking into her bones and making them feel molten and easy. "So," she asks Neville, a little more brightly, the faint touch of a smile at her mouth genuine. "You think I should give Malfoy his things then, Neville?"

"I think you should do what feels right, Hermione," he says very seriously. "You have a good moral compass, and sense of justice." A smile twitches at his own lips as he compliments her, and the curve to her mouth grows as she remembers S.P.E.W. and wonders if that is what _he_ is thinking of too. "Trust your instincts. Don't do anything – or keep from doing it – just to please Harry, or _anyone_ else."

Hermione nods firm, bolstered by his words, which she will heed. If she wants to help Malfoy, she will do it, and damn the consequences – and although it makes her feel inexplicably nervy and tense, she _does_ want to. In fact, she thinks, she might go and see him this afternoon. It isn't like she has any other important business pressing on her time. She smiles across the table and leans back in her chair, feeling as though a weight has been lifted off her.

"And you, Neville? How are you doing, lately, with it all? What are you doing, to get through?" she enquires cautiously, not wanting to intrude on Neville's privacy, and he gives her a fond smile that she doesn't understand.

"I'm doing all right, Hermione," he tells her. "Not brilliant – who _is_ brilliant right now? But…I'm okay, in myself." He seems to mean it – he is always so _honest_ – and then he skilfully turns the conversation toward other friends, and other things. And the rest of the morning is spent pleasantly – although Hermione's eyes still keep drifting over to the box filled with Malfoy's things, and the broomstick tucked behind it. This afternoon, she thinks again in a corner of her mind as she smiles at a joke Neville has made; she doesn't often laugh anymore. No one really does.

**Healer's Station, ****Janus Thickey Ward, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

"You want to see _him?_" The Healer's voice is thick with disgust as she refers to Malfoy, and Hermione shifts her grip on the box handle as the edges dig into her palm, a vague frown slipping across her features. This Healer is new; a sturdy woman edging toward middle-age, she was at first a spark of bright and welcoming life in the stark sterility of the hospital, all smiles, ecstatic to be meeting the 'war heroine'. She introduced herself as Pam – a Muggleborn witch whose twin sister was brutally murdered in Diagon Alley, near the beginning of the war. She tells Hermione that she was never very good at battle spells, but that she fought against the Dark the only way she knew how – by Healing.

But now Pam has drawn in upon herself behind the Healer's Station counter; hunched down and eyes darkening, a kind of sullen, suspicious disbelief emanating from her. It is the mention of Malfoy that has done it, and Hermione feels a little touch of concern that she can't quite put her finger on. Most people dislike Malfoy, but this woman…there is something poisonous in her face. Hermione nods, keeping her features as neutral as she can, that suspicion edging up and down her spine like spidering fingers.

"Yes. I do. I have some things for him, today," she says lightly, tensing as a wave of goosebumps shivers over her flesh. The afternoon is summer's-end hot outside; a lazy, mellow kind of warmth, that limns the world with blue skies above and rich sunlight tint on all that lies beneath the clear, cloudless blue. Inside it is all cold whites and icy blues, the air cool and dry, and the barred windows in the waiting room are on the wrong side to catch the afternoon sun. It leaves Hermione feeling chilled in her camisole top, with just a light plaid shirt unbuttoned over it, fitted khaki trousers that feel too thin now, and trainers.

Pam shifts uncomfortably on her feet, rubber soles of her shoes squeaking faintly on the floor, and her mouth purses in, her eyes dart edgily. There is sullen anger in her features, and blood flushes the woman's cheeks dark and blotched. Hermione notes it all, and her worry picks up. She cannot put her finger on it, but there is something more wrong here then just the general hate of a young ex-Death Eater.

"You _visit_ him, Miss Granger?" That same thick disgust, dripping off the woman's tongue, her eyes narrowing on Hermione. She shifts the box again, getting a more secure grip on the thick cardboard box handle, her fingers cramping slightly, surreptitiously checking that her wand is in easy reach, there at her hip. There is something _wrong_ about this Healer.

"I have been, yes. Draco Malfoy was responsible for saving my life."

"He -? I find it hard to believe the boy is capable of doing any good. He – he and his _family_ were responsible for doing evil not good," Pam spits out, uneven and ragged, little droplets of spittle flying from her lips as she pops the 'p' in _responsible_ vehemently. Hermione takes a step back, her pulse stepping up a notch, heart swoosh-thumping faster, as though she is running, as though she is fighting. The fury in the woman's voice is suffocating. "I'm sorry. I've upset you, Miss Granger," Pam apologises, and Hermione shuts her eyes and breaths in and out, soothing her frayed nerves before attempting to speak again.

"Regardless, I am here to visit Malfoy, and I would like to see him _now_, please," she tells Pam, staring down the woman, who is slightly shorter than Hermione, and built a little sturdier. The woman draws back from the counter and lifts her chin, a haughty kind of bossiness settling on her sullen features. She shoves several stacks of parchment fussily around her work area, the precise little movements reminding Hermione eerily of Delores Umbridge.

"I'm afraid _Mister_ Malfoy isn't well enough today," Pam says sharp and petty, her eyes sliding away from Hermione's. There is angry fear in the woman's eyes and tension in the little pushes and pulls she gives the parchments on her desk, a cramped, trapped hunch to her shoulders, and it all creates an echo of fear in Hermione. Alarm bells jangle loud in Hermione's head, making her almost-subconsciously shift the box from one hand to the other so that she can rest her free hand on the butt of her wand, where it sticks out of her back pocket.

"The Healers told me that Malfoy was stable – even improving, a little. What's happened? What's…what's wrong with him, exactly?" She narrows her eyes and cants her head to the side a little, her gaze steady and piercing on the other woman.

"He's had a relapse, I'm afraid, Miss Granger." Pam sucks in her cheeks and fiddles with a ring on her left index finger, eying Hermione with a sympathetic smile that stinks of falsity. Hermione doesn't trust the woman as far as she can throw her without magic, but nothing seems outright wrong here. Malfoy may well have had a relapse, and she can't really think terribly of someone for merely despising a Malfoy. _But_. Something does not seem right here. Hermione hums thoughtfully to herself, eyes casting to the magic-sealed doors that the Janus Thickey Ward lies behind.

"What kind of relapse? What's happened? Is it serious?" She is genuinely worried, but a large part of her is watching the woman for any hint of suspicious behaviour.

"It's….somewhat severe," Pam hedges, uneasiness set all through her; in the way she holds herself, and the way she won't meet Hermione's eyes. "Or so the specialist senior Healers say."

"I should like to see him anyway, thank you, Pam."

"I can't allow that. It's the specialist's orders that Mister Malfoy not be disturbed." Pam's voice shifts up nervously, and Hermione hisses through her teeth. Something is definitely _wrong_ here, and it might just be something minor, but it worries Hermione. She puffs out a frustrated exhale of air, and pushes her point. She won't leave until she's been assured nothing untoward is going on – and she rather fears she won't be assured of that.

"I don't care. I won't disturb him then. I just want to peek in on him, and see that he's all right."

"That is against hospital rules!" Pam's voice grows to a furious shrill, before she moderates it, face flushed and hands clenching into fists. "I'm sorry Miss Granger, but you'll have to come back another time."

"No."

"What?"

"I said 'no'." Hermione explains bluntly, tone crisp and edged with anger as she holds the Healer's gaze until the woman looks away. "I could go to the head of your department right now, and explain your obstructive behaviour, and not only would you probably land in a great deal of trouble, but I would also be able to go see Malfoy without a single peep of protest from the department head. Because I am Hermione Granger." She feels a little horrible for using her 'war heroine' status to get her own way, but at least it's a useful purpose for the uncomfortably worshipful attitude so often displayed towards her. "So why don't we skip the bit where you get in trouble, Pam, and you just take me to see him now?"

The woman's shoulders slump, and she lets out a sigh that shakes with grief and defeat. "I can't," she says thickly, and the dull look in her dark eyes makes Hermione's skin crawl over with a very real fear. Not for herself; for Malfoy.

"Why not, Pam?" Hermione asks urgently, but the woman just shrugs, eyes far away. It as though the light inside the woman has been snuffed out, and she sits dark and dull, hunched in on herself behind the desk. It is frightening. She is scared for Malfoy and her heart beats in a sick hummingbird panic as she pulls her wand from her pocket at last, leaning forward over the desk and trying to catch the woman's eye. Her hand slaps on the cool countertop. "Pam?" The woman's name snaps off her tongue, sharp in the cool, dry air.

"His father was the one who killed my sister," the Healer offers mildly, staring down at the desk. "So it's fair. Turnabout is fair play. If Lucius Malfoy took my sister from me…then it's fair…" Her gaze lifts to Hermione, standing frozen and horrified, staring with wide eyes. "Fair to hurt his Death Eater scum son, isn't it? Just like his father hurt –"

"Oh my god." Hermione's hand flies to her mouth for a brief second. "You're mad. You're _insane_," she spills out in shock and horrified anger, and Pam shrinks down in her chair. The Healer doesn't look dangerous or ominous any more; she seems fragile, damaged, twisted all up in torturous knots with her grief.

"I – I only gave him what he deserved," the woman mutters broken, a deflated wreck, utterly motionless but for her hands twisting around and around together. Hermione's heart clenches and sick horror rushes over her like a flood of ice water, and she _stupefies _the Healer without a moment's hesitation. The ward doors fly open as she flings an unlocking charm at them, flying through at a run, slamming them shut behind her with another careless flick of her wand.

_What he deserves._

**Room 7, Janus Thickey Ward, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

The room smells stale and sour-rotten when she shoves the door open; like sickness and decay and Hermione's nose crinkles and her lips purse up. She stutters to a halt, breathless, feeling the weight of the air close in on her. Malfoy is nowhere to be seen; the bed is unmade – twisted sheets fallen half off it – but empty. The two chairs beside the lone, sunny window are unoccupied. Hermione's eyes scan everything as she turns in a slow circle, trying to catch her breath and failing, fear roiling up in her. She thinks – hopes – that Pam the Healer could not have done anything _too_ horrible to Malfoy, because then wouldn't the other staff have noticed and reported it? But then again, it is Malfoy, and would anyone even care? She wants to think they would, but she isn't naive enough to convince herself of that.

Her gaze lands on the door to the bathroom. It stands ajar by several inches.

"Malfoy?" There is no answer to break the stale stillness of the room. Hermione's short and shallow breath quickens. She takes a step toward it. "Malfoy?" Nothing – not even the whisper of a sound. The silence is deafening, broken only by the rustle of her clothing and faint squeak of her trainer soles on the lino. Hermione crosses cautiously to the bathroom door, peeking through the crack with cheeks blazing heated with half-expected embarrassment, even as her spine runs cold with the anticipation of something horrible. All she can see is a narrow stretch of floor, the end of the vanity, and a corner of the shower cubicle. Her fingertips just barely brush the round doorknob, and she leans forward, closer to the crack.

"Malfoy? _Please_, answer me." The doorknob is made of polished dark wood and feels cool and smooth on Hermione's fingers as she closes them around it and hesitates, staring at it. "God…" She takes a breath and pushes it open, her eyes turning discreetly to the floor just in case he…

"Malfoy!"

One gasp of his name breaks ragged and strangled out of Hermione's throat, and then her hand comes up to press hard against her mouth, crushing her lips sudden and painful into her teeth. He is _on_ the floor. He makes a crumpled heap there on the lino, seemingly unconscious; a tangle of thin limbs in too-big hospital garments, twitching and jerking spasmodically as she _stares_ at him, clutching the doorframe to keep her balance. The room stinks of human waste, sweat, and sickness, and she chokes on the smell of it. Her cheeks are hot and her eyes are wide and horrified; embarrassed and _scared_ for him, and _angry_.

Then she moves to him, rushed-fast and shaky.

"Malfoy, oh my god. Oh Merlin. Christ. Malfoy. What – what _happened? _What –" Words stutter and spill meaningless out of Hermione as she sinks to her knees by his head, staring at the fall of fine, brittle white-blonde hair that hides his face from her. She can see his eyes are shut through the veil of his fringe. His hand flexes, fingers twitching and scraping on the lino, and she tentatively – frightened knots all tightening in her stomach – pushes his hair back, exposing a cheek and jaw splotched with bruises, and bloodied, bitten lips. A breath rattles into his lungs as she kneels there with her fingers still buried in his lank hair; a wheezing sound, and then his body jerks with another little spasm. It is wrong. So wrong, to see Malfoy – _anyone_ – helpless and hurting like this.

"Oh god, what did she _do_ to you?" He has soiled himself, Hermione realises with an ache in her chest, which is stuffed painfully with pity and horror. He has been lying in here utterly helpless, unable to even get to the loo to relieve himself. And the Healers – all of them who must have known Malfoy's condition – had just left him like this.

_Just_ _left him._

The sheer cruel degradation of it makes her furious and seething up with fierce sympathy for the insensible man on the floor. He had already been broken enough. He had already lost enough. It was all _enough._ Anger makes Hermione's breath come short and hard, and her fingers are shaking until she curls them around her wand. Her hands won't move properly and her thoughts are scattered like mice, and she has to attempt the _scourgify_ three times before it finally works. It strips most of the filth away from Malfoy's twitching body, leaving dry, raw skin from too many previous _scourgifies. _An ingrained stain of grime on that abused skin remains however, and Hermione knows it will take a proper bath with soap and water to cleanse away.

Her horror and fury on Malfoy's behalf is swamped by a sudden rush of fear for him as his back stiffens, making his whole body bow and arch. Her mind is clattering frantically at her as he lets out a tortured little moan and his limbs spasm. The convulsion is as violent and frightening as it was the first time she saw it, and she chokes out a small whimper; part of her mind thinking that yes, of course – Pam must have been withholding Malfoy's meds. His potions. That is the best explanation, and it makes her want to hex the woman with something painful, despite that she feels a strange, sick sympathy for the Healer. Malfoy's arm hits wildly against Hermione's knees as she kneels there beside him; hits hard enough to hurt. She shuffles back fast on her knees and tries to catch his hand on thoughtless, stupid instinct.

She can't remember what you're supposed to do when someone has a seizure.

"Malfoy." She tries pointlessly to soothe him but hisses as his knuckles rap on her wrist in their blind flailing. "_God_. _Merlin!_ Ouch." She catches his wrist and manages to hold it tightly, forcing her fingers to interlock with his and clamp down, stilling the spasms. The rest of his body is still jerking and thrashing on the lino, and his fingers are clammy and cold between hers, and the skin feels like paper. His fingertips are bloodied again, and leave streaks on her skin, his nails ruined and torn away – she knows why, when she sees his other hand claw at the floor repeatedly. Hurting himself. Malfoy's face is drawn into an ugly snarl of pain, his eyes rolling and fluttering; half shut and the whites showing. His teeth sink into his upper lip, and she jumps and winces, her free hand reaching up to pet at his mouth uselessly. His teeth stay sunk in his lip, drawing blood and bruising.

"What do I _do_?" A sob escapes her, and her cheeks are salt-wet. She has always hated suffering. She needs to fix it, needs to stop it. Panic is a bubble that swells in Hermione's chest to the exclusion of all else. She feels like she can't breathe. Malfoy is jerking on the floor in the remnants of his own filth, and she knows that a _stupefy _or _petrificus totalus _can't stop the seizure – magically induced convulsions like this one cannot be halted by magical paralysis or unconsciousness. She sucks in a whistling breath through her teeth, sounding wet and snotty, and just waits with her heart pounding in her throat. It hurts to look at him. It hurts so damn much, so she shuts her eyes and remembers against her will.

This was how Ron died.

On the ground, convulsing as he haemorrhaged, blood pouring and trickling from every orifice as the curse he'd been struck with had liquefied his organs. There was nothing anyone could have done, they told her afterwards. Hermione squeezes Malfoy's hand harder and tears seep out from between her lids, trickling ticklish over her cheeks and dripping from her jaw. She hadn't even been there when Ron died – she had been fighting for her life somewhere…else – lost in the smoke and screams of battle. Susan says she should be glad she hadn't had to see it. Hermione doesn't feel it. She is _angry_ because she has read the reports and heard people's accounts – she _knows_ what happened, and she envisions it and has nightmares about it just as if she was there, but she _hadn't_ been. And she _should_ have been.

Hermione wishes that she had been with Ron in those last, precious, wretched moments; to hold his hand like Susan had, like she holds Malfoy's now.

The fingertips clawing into her hand _relax._ The convulsing body beside her goes suddenly limp – twitching a little, but not seizing in the same way. And then the fingers interlinked with hers squeeze with a gentle and rather unsteady firmness, and the thumb skids over the back of her hand in something that feels unsettlingly like a needy caress. Hermione sniffs and opens her eyes, and meets lucid grey ones, staring up at her filled with so _much_ that her breath catches in her throat. The pain and embarrassment in those bruised-around eyes are overshadowed by a profound _relief_ that makes Hermione's tears swim up again, a lump of emotion clogging in her throat. His tongue sweeps out and gingerly wets his maimed lips – chapped, bruised, swollen, and bleeding, she winces at the sight of them.

"…Granger," he gets out in a hoarse rasp that is so insubstantial she has to strain to hear it.

"Malfoy." She holds his hand in both of hers now, a smile wavering weepy on her face as she blinks hard. "_Malfoy_." Her brain is dull and dumb, mouth on repeat, her own relief stupidly large, and the hope and desperation in his face humbles her, staggers her – he looks at her as though she is his last and only chance. His _saviour_. It is too much; it is wrong that he looks at _her_ like that, and she wants to break beneath the trust and gratitude in his eyes. He has no one else, she realises, and that just hurts worse. "It's going to be okay," she tells him.

"The – the Healer…" He is trying to explain, his hand clinging to hers so hard now that she thinks he will splinter the tiny bones in it, his forehead creased deep with the rising pain she knows he feels. "She…"

"I know. Or – I think I know. She's been hurting you – I know that. How?" She speaks fast and with pain in her voice although she doesn't detach his death grip on her hand despite the growing pain it is causing her. She will let him have this outlet after the days and days of torture – because that is what it is; torture – that he has been through. She frowns with the pain of it, hurrying him to speak with another short _'how?'_ because she doesn't know how long he will be lucid. How long he has before he sinks insensible into the pain or another seizure. She scoops up her wand with her free hand and casts a numbing charm on Malfoy's twitching body – it won't do much, but it may help slightly.

His eyes are locked onto her face disconcertingly, and his mouth flickers with the barest ghost of a smile as the numbing charm sinks into his flesh. He looks like death; pallid and thin, more papery skin bruised than not, from what she can see. There is an abject, pitiful thanks in his eyes.

"You're –" he can't finish at first, voice cracking into nothingness, and it takes her a stupid, flustered second too long to realise he needs water. A carefully spoken _aguamenti _produces a weak, faltering stream of water from her wand, which she places at his lips like a straw. The water spills out from between his feeble lips, sliding in droplets and tiny rivers down his chin and jaw to wet his neck and splatter on the floor. He swallows though, throat bobbing, before turning his head away slightly to signal he has had enough. She leans forward.

"_How_, Malfoy?"

"You're h-h-here," he says faintly instead of answering her question. "You're a-actually…_here_."

"I am." Her hands cradle his twitching one with tender carefulness, mindful of his bleeding fingertips, and she tries to smile at him reassuringly. "I – I'm sorry I wasn't here sooner," she tells him, and means it. To her shock and horror, Malfoy starts to weep – a silent slip of tears from the corners of his eyes, his mouth trembling from emotion and not the spasms.

"I th-thought…" he starts to say, and then shuts his eyes and seems to try to regain control of himself; quivering lips pressing together, a deep slash carving between his drawn-together brows, breath ragged and shaking. "I th-th-th…"

"I know." She chokes on the words. He thought that no one was going to save him. "But it's okay. I'm here. I know it was the Healer, Pam, who was hurting you. She admitted it – confessed to me. But I need to know _how_ so I can help you. Was she withholding your potions, Malfoy?" He manages a nod, sucking little breaths in and out, clinging to Hermione's hand like she is a lifeline. She is _so_ not comfortable with this, but she will be damned if she shakes him off her when he is so obviously starved for human contact, so filled with desperation and fear. She squeezes as firmly as she can without hurting him, her knees sore from her awkward kneeling position on the floor.

"And the other Healers knew," she says, more stating the facts to herself than asking such an obvious question, but Malfoy nods again anyway, his eyes still squeezed shut, although he is no longer weeping. The thought that St Mungo's staff have been knowingly allowing a patient to suffer – _no; _have been aiding and abetting the torture of a patient – is so abhorrent to Hermione that her skin prickles hot all over with rage as the reality of it hits her full force. She doesn't know what to _do_. She is at a complete and utter loss, staring at a streak of blood on the floor past Malfoy's head with unfocused eyes as her mind ticks over.

"Shit," she mutters, and Malfoy's eyes flick to meet hers – a hint of surprise behind the pain. "I _am _capable of swearing, you know," she tells him tartly, and then does it again for good measure: "_Shit._"

"_Pl-please_ – please d-d-don't…_leave me_." Malfoy forces out the last two words without stuttering using what seems like sheer willpower, too desperate and hurting to care how undignified it is of him to beg a _mudblood_ and Hermione covers her face with her hand. She cannot stand how broken he is.

"I won't. I won't." She swallows hard as she comes to the only decision that she can make – the obvious solution, the best choice, the maddest, most ridiculous… Harry will never forgive her. She is betraying Ron's memory. She is a sentimental fool. Even Neville will probably be taken aback. It may not even be technically _legal. _But if she doesn't do it then she knows she will never forgive herself. He saved her life; she is the reason he is here like this, and she owes him a debt. She is only now beginning to realise just how _much_ she owes him.

She can't just _leave_ Malfoy here, not even if she has severe words with the Head Healer of the Janus Thickey Ward, and has Pam up on charges – which she _will_ be doing. But that is not enough to reassure her that Malfoy will be all right; not when she knows perfectly well that all the other Healers were happy to see him suffer. They are just as responsible, in a way. And even if they are all fired and replaced, any replacements would have exactly the same attitudes towards Malfoy, and Hermione can't blame them their feelings even though she condemns how they express that hate. At any rate, she thinks as she shuts her eyes and tries to be calm, the fact of it is that Malfoy isn't safe here, and she doesn't know what else she can do.

"_Shit_," Hermione says yet again, and shudders out a sigh of resignation. "It's only temporary," she tells herself aloud, helplessly, not sure what on earth she is saying, or doing. "Just until I've…sorted something else out." Malfoy's fingers are cold and desperately tight on hers as she looks down at him - bruised face and grey eyes bloodshot and ringed with dark shadows.

"Don't le-leave me h-here, Granger," he begs her, pupils dilating and swamping his irises as he stares up at her pathetically, the pain beginning to glaze his eyes over. She swallows around the lump of emotion in her throat.

"I won't, Malfoy. It's okay. I won't."

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Thank you for reading! Please leave a review; your feedback feeds me :3


	5. Five

Thank you so much to all those who read and review, (not just this fic, but my other Dramione fics too.) I heart you all immensely xx

Well, this chapter kind of ran away with me lengthwise, so what little plot this fic contains hasn't advanced as far as I expected. Whoops! I hope you enjoy!

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**Part Five**

**Room 7, Janus Thickey Ward, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

Draco can't walk. He hasn't been able to do it for days, and he can't now, even with Granger's help. It doesn't stop her from trying to get him to though, the stubborn bint. And he tries too, so hard; because even now he has some pathetic shreds of pride left to him, and because she wants him to and he will do whatever she wants if it means he will get out of this hell. Granger struggles to keep him upright with surprisingly strong arms, her hot breath huffing out against his chest as she holds him in the mockery of a hug. They sway together unsteadily in the middle of the bathroom floor, and his bare feet feel clumsy and wrong on the floor.

"Is this hurting you?" Granger asks breathlessly, worried. He realises belatedly that he is making quiet, wounded sounds of pain – whimpering helplessly. Shame washes over him for his lack of self-control. "Malfoy? Malfoy, please, we don't have to do this if it's hurting. I – I can go find a wheelchair."

A pathetic panic rises up sharp in Draco, and his trembling, palsied hands grip at her shoulders harder, fingers clamping down, ragged nails making her wince but he can't let go. He is terrified that this is just some dream. A hallucination just like Pansy was. He is frozen with the stupid fear that if Granger goes she will never come back, and he will collapse back to the bathroom floor and lie there helpless in his own filth for whatever is left of his , useless life.

"N-n-n-no," he stammers desperately. "N-no don't le-le-leave me, please. P-please. _Granger_. I – I c-can walk." He forces his numbed, weak legs to take a stumbling step, using all his damned strength and succeeding in only sliding his left foot forward several inches. It is _something_, at least. He bites his tongue to keep silent as an extra surge of pain licks along his nerves and makes him want to scream. The pain has been constant lately; liquid fire soaked into every inch of him. It eats him up until he can barely think through it, until the edges of his vision darken as he greys out, or sometimes blacks out altogether. He has been lying collapsed on the cold bathroom floor for days, just marinating in the agony. And other things too, things for which he is not too far gone to feel acute, miserable embarrassment for.

His cheeks flush hot as he thinks about the disgusting state he must have been in when she found him. Lying in his own piss and shit like a dying animal. _Merlin_. He is disgusting. _Pathetic_.

"Come on, Malfoy," Granger gasps with frustration and exertion layered in her panted words, as Draco leans heavily on her and makes himself take faltering steps that send lances of pain shooting up his legs. He wobbles like a newborn colt with the near-constant barrage of minor convulsions running through his muscles. "Come _on_. Or just let me go get a wheelchair. This is _ridiculous_."

Granger smells sweet; heady vanilla and cinnamon wafting from her hair and clothes, and Draco is so ashamed. She is clean and soft and warm, and he is a filthy wreck still, despite her attempt at cleaning him. The grime of days and days of neglect is engrained indelibly into his skin, along with the stale, wretched stink of this place. It is funny that he used to mock her for being dirty. Look at him now. Fucking look at him _now._

He feels like crying.

"I – I ca-an do it," Draco pants out, trying to lean less on Granger, his arm still slung around her shoulders, and hers around his waist. He takes another halting step, using all his strength and concentration to push through the pain. A small measure of satisfaction rises up as he manages an almost normal step. And then a proper seizure grabs him in greedy claws, and his knees buckle under him. "_No_…" His arm tightens around Granger's shoulders and then jerks away as the seizure spreads until it grips all of him. "_…please…_"

Draco is a mere passenger in his own body, helpless and useless as he slumps, twitching and jerking. Granger flings both arms around his waist as his full weight collapses dead, taking it on herself – she is trying to slow his fall, he thinks. He wants to tell her not to bother, that it hurts so much that hitting the ground won't even register, but his mouth won't cooperate and reality seems to be drifting away. She says his name; he bites his tongue as a convulsion works his jaw, blood trickles down his throat and out from between his lips. She says his name again, frantic, and her eyes are wide and scared. They end up on the floor together – not a fall but more a controlled kind of crumple – and she is heavy half atop him, and then there is nothing.

Her hair in his face is the first thing Draco knows; wild and soft, brushing over his cheeks like tickling candyfloss fluff. He is still seizing a little, jerking as her arm wraps around his shoulders and cradles along his neck to keep his head from falling back. Like a baby, he thinks in despairing self-loathing. Thank Merlin for small favours; he doesn't seem to have wet himself at least. Not this time, anyway. Granger huffs a breath that blows hot and ticklish against his ear; face buried into the crook of his neck as she struggles with his stupid body as if he is a lifeless mannequin.

"_Why?_" she is muttering to herself as she seems to attempt to sit him up propped against her arm. Her voice is muffled against his skin, and he is still dazed, unable to properly make sense of most of what she is saying. "Why, why, _why?_ …such a _bad_ bloody idea. Neville…horrified… Merlin's sake, so…and _Malfoy_ no less…couldn't be _worse, _could it, Hermione…"

Fear and shame, and a myriad of other awful feelings swarm up in Draco before he is even fully conscious, stinging at him until he cowers under their barrage. His tongue is throbbing and the metallic taste of blood fills his mouth, his muscles are still ratcheting agonisingly tight in terrible spasms, and his head aches fiercely. But his first concern is not his hurts and how bad they might be, but rather, _what if she leaves?_

"I'm…I'm s-sorry," he slurs frantically with a thick, swollen tongue, with a mouth that doesn't want to do as he instructs it. It comes out barely intelligible, and he tries again, desperately afraid Granger will change her mind about helping him. "I'm _sorry_…"

"You're awake," she says, quiet surprise, pulling away and meeting his eyes with concern and swift assessment. She is flushed pink from exertion, and a vial of potion glints in her hand as she lifts it up into his line of sight with a triumphant little smile, but he can't figure out why she looks so pleased with herself. The purple liquid looks vaguely familiar, but his mind is fuzzed from the seizure still; he feels like he is half-dreaming. Granger yanks the cork out with neat white teeth, and spits it delicately to one side. Dainty but efficient, the motion was just like his mother, and Draco smiles faintly at the odd thought. Thankfully she stops him from voicing it aloud when she speaks first, tone awkward as she tries to reassure him.

"Don't be sorry, Malfoy. Just… None of this is your fault. It's – it's the Healers' fault for doing this to you. I can't believe that – that St Mungo's could let this _happen_." She sounds genuinely shocked and distraught, before she shakes her head to clear it and breathes in and out deeply, shoulders rising and falling. "Now here, drink this."

"…What...is…?"

"Pain relief potion, Malfoy – the strongest I could find. You were actually out for a while after the, um, seizure. I went and got some potions and a wheelchair from the nurses' station," she tells him with a gentle kind of briskness, and Draco parts his lips obediently when she puts the vial to them. She tips carefully so as not to drown in him in the liquid as most of the Healers did, when he was still _getting_ potions, and it trickles down his blood-coated throat tasting like aniseed. He shuts his eyes as he swallows slow and painful, breathing in Granger's scent of vanilla and cinnamon, which wafts around him and makes him feel like he could be somewhere else entirely.

"Good," she says very softly as though he is a child she is soothing. "Very good," she murmurs with an absent, distracted sort of caring, and it's _nice. _Draco is ashamed to admit it to himself, but he has been starved of everything bar vicious loathing and hurt and hatred, for so long that he drinks up her small kindness as eagerly as he drinks the potion. Her soft, small words are like a balm to him, sending a strange feeling snaking through him in tentative tendrils. Leaching the despair out of his bones and filling them up with warmth, and memories of home, and a sense that maybe things will be as okay as they can ever be, soon. The vial clinks on the floor as she tosses it carelessly away. "One more, Malfoy."

He keeps his eyes shut; it all seems easier somehow to accept her pity and his pitiful state, if he can't see. Like a stupid damned child. With his eyes shut and that vanilla-and-cinnamon enveloping him, it just feels like a very welcome dream. And he is so _very_ tired. He could nearly fall asleep like this – he doesn't know when he last truly slept. He has spent hours and hours unconscious and in half-aware dazes, but he hasn't _slept _for so long. Merlin, he wants so badly to just _sleep._ When the cold glass of another vial touches to his lips, he parts them again and drinks down the potion without hesitating or asking what it is this time, even though he wants to know. He fizzs with uneasiness not knowing, but…well…

Granger is acting kindly, but having to deal with him is obviously an enormous inconvenience for her, to say the least. And Draco doesn't want to do anything to irritate her further because he doesn't know how far her kindness will reach.

"Th-thank you," Draco stammers nervously, opening his eyes but keeping them fixed on his limply sprawled lower body stretched out across the floor, unable to meet Granger's gaze. "Thank you. I – I – thank y-you, Gr-Granger." He is abjectly grateful, grovelling like a House Elf before its master, but he no longer even cares that much, really. He lost his dignity when Granger told him _'good'_ in that soft, gentle voice. It is a vaguely frightening realisation. He feels sick. He thinks there is a small part of himself that despises himself for it, but that self-loathing doesn't change his other feelings. Self-loathing doesn't change the fact that Granger, the Mudblood he tormented, the Muggleborn whose life he saved at cost of his own, holds the balance of his life in her hands.

And she says she owes him, and she _does_, she owes him more than she can ever make up, he thinks, the reality of what he did for her flaring up and igniting in the waves of pain that still wash over him. But that doesn't mean she will honour the debt if he isn't suitably appreciative. "Thank you…" he says one last, grovelling time. Draco's bare toes twitch involuntarily with a spasm, and his mouth tastes like lingering traces of blood, aniseed, and the stale, metallic sourness of the last potion.

He can see Granger's face out of the corner of his eye, and she looks sad and deeply uncomfortable as she carefully shifts him around so he can rest his back against the wall. He has enough control over himself now to help, swivelling around and sinking back with an effort that makes him shake. "You – don't thank me like that, Malfoy. You don't have to _grovel._ What else was I going to do? _Not_ help you?" Granger says at last, her tone slightly tart, as if she's offended by his behaviour. Draco wants instinctively to apologise again, but he can sense she won't appreciate that, if she didn't appreciate the way he said his thanks.

"I don't know what you think of me, Malfoy – obviously nothing good – but I… Well, I can't _leave_ you here, can I?" Her full mouth shifts and purses, and then pulls down in a small frown as she murmurs again, something he only catches half of: "…what you think of me. _Merlin_." She huffs to herself, adjusting him in the corner she has pulled him into, and gently shoving his long, lank hair off his face and tucking the ends behind his ear, an absent kind of gesture he doesn't think she even knows she did.

"I hate you," Draco tells her dazedly – what he thinks of her – the words just slipping out, as the pain begins to retreat to bearable levels and the haze of the potion's side effects seep through him fast. The pain potion makes him stupid; takes away the filter between brain and mouth, and now he may well suffer for it. He told her he hates her; he's an idiot. _Idiot_. But Granger just flashes him an unhappy look that he can't make any sense of, except there's none of the indignant anger he expected to see. She looks rather like she wants to cry, but not like she's going to storm away and leave him to rot, and he can't understand it.

"I know," she says softly as she eases her arm out from behind Draco's shoulders, and makes sure he can keep himself sitting upright – he can, just barely.

"I m-mean…not…I d-don't mean…please." Draco struggles to explain as Granger pushes to her feet with a small groan. He tries to grab at her as she moves away, but his fingers refuse to close, slipping uselessly from around her ankle. "I don't h-h-hate you, Granger. I r-resent that…you're…sh-shit – I – n-never mind." There's no point in trying to explain; he's only making it worse. Everything comes out wrong; the truth unfettered on his tongue. And when Granger moves away, Draco is certain she is going to walk out of the bathroom with easy, measured steps that _he_ will never be able to do again, and shut the door behind her. Panic swells in Draco's chest, and he can't catch his breath – propped slumped against the wall in the filthy bathroom corner like a murder victim, mind dulled and body twitching, pain still edging through him. If she goes he can't hope to stop her.

He will rot here, for as long as he lives.

Then Granger walks to the door and Draco's heart stutters and crumples in his chest, before she begins talking. She sounds tired, and guilty, and somehow it seems wrong on her. She shouldn't sound like this. "That I'm here and you're there instead of the other way around," She says, finishing what he had been trying to say before he'd thought better of it. "I know. I would hate me too, I suppose." Granger steps out of sight for a split second and then back into view with a wheelchair she tries to roll into the bathroom, making a frustrated little sound as the wheel catches on the frame the first attempt. She tries again, huffing in annoyance, tone reflecting it. "But – but this is the way it is. Life isn't _fair_. You're there, I'm here, your father's in Azkaban –" Her voice goes up and wobbles, and she is red-faced now and yanking at the wheelchair furiously, hair fluffing out around her head. "– And Harry's in _Nepal_ when we need him _here_, and Ron's _d-d-dead…_"

That is when Granger stops struggling with the wheelchair and starts to cry; great, heaving, miserable sobs as she clings onto the wheelchair handles, and Draco doesn't know what the fuck to do.

He sits silently on the cold tile floor, watching her spill her grief with a strange, uncomfortable feeling squirming in his stomach. He feels as though he should say _something_, but dazed and useless as he is, he has no idea _what,_ or whether she would even want him to try to help. Ultimately, he was the enemy even if he isn't now – it was the fault of _his_ side that Ronald Weasley and all her friends died, whether he saved _her_ life or not. Whether he'd wanted to be on that side or not. Whether he'd had a fucking choice or _not _– although he supposed he _had_ had a choice, or he wouldn't have saved her in the end. He tells himself that he wishes he'd let her die as he stares at her hunched over the wheelchair, weeping, but somehow it doesn't ring true anymore.

Then she straightens up and composes herself as he watches from the corner with his glazing eyes, lolling with his temple pressed to one wall, pain fizzling through him with every little twitch of his muscles, which come less frequently now. He feels heavy and limp, and he suspects the second potion was a muscle relaxant. Each breath he takes is deep and slow. Her tartan plaid shirt is a spot of bright red, purple, and navy colour in the dim, white-walled room, and his eyes track her automatically as she moves. He is dreamy and losing himself, stupid brain drawn simply to the brightness. She hefts the wheelchair into the bathroom at last with a determined wriggle, and it scrapes on the frame, scoring away ribbons of white paint. It takes up half the floor space, and she edges around it awkwardly.

"Stupid thing," Granger mutters as she turns to face him, pushing her hair off her face with a wrist. She is all colours; flushed and blotchy cheeks, red-rimmed but still clear eyes, and lips that look as though they have been worried at and ripened with blood, her shirt vivid beneath it all, her hair a pre-Raphaelite mass of dark, fluffy waves. Grief shapes her face in lines and curves, and there are dark shadows under her clear eyes, and an exhausted sense of loss that trembles in her lips. She should be painted like this, Draco thinks dreamily as he stares up at her; grief suits her. Makes her into a beautifully wounded apparition-like presence, here and yet not here at once – or maybe that is _him_. Everything seems so unreal through the lens of the pain relief potions that drug him.

He wonders vaguely just how _much_ Granger gave him, because when he tries to move his hands they leave visual echoes – multiple thin, pale hands streaming through the air one after the other. What colour is in the stark room – _her _ and only _her _– seems too bright. The smell of the room is even stronger than the colour; rank and humiliating. He is so disgusting. So vile. So… His thoughts drift and swirl, dancing away from him as his vision shifts in blurs and smears of vividness, nothing quite making sense anymore.

"Up you get, Malfoy," she says in a small, croaking voice that is still thick with the tears she cried. "Time to go." She lifts him with a levitation spell that wavers enough to make him nervous even _through _the thick, dulling haze of his potions, and feels strange and awful besides. He flails stupidly for the ground and she hisses and tells him to keep still, and then he feels the wheelchair seat beneath his arse, and his arms fall oddly over the arms of it. He tries to lift them, but much like his head – which lolls so his chin rests on his chest uncomfortably – his arms are clumsy now, and uncooperative. Draco thinks Granger gave him rather too much muscle relaxant; at least the muscle spasms have nearly completely stopped.

He snorts softly with an almost laugh as she tries with tentative care and patience to arrange his arms on the wheelchair arm rests, and they keep flopping off again. She _does_ laugh; a weepy little giggle that doesn't have much humour to it. And then she carefully lifts his hands – large and thin and horrendously bony – and lays them in his lap. Her hands are hot and soft, and just a little damp as she arranges them. So much smaller and yet so much stronger than his are, he thinks with an undercurrent of sour resentment. His hands should be capable of squeezing her slim throat until the blood stops flowing and she blacks out, her windpipe crushing, her neck snapping…the image springs fully formed into his mind and it is both revolting and frighteningly _compelling_. Because yes, he hates that their positions are not reversed, even though he now thinks with an odd clarity, that he would not change the choice he made that led them to this.

Instead he enjoys the gentle slide of her fingertips over his hands and arms out of pure tactile pleasure. He has been starved of touch, and now he is a dog who is grateful for scraps, and with a burning flush of shame he hears himself whimper with the loss as she finishes neatly arranging his hands, and withdraws hers. She gives him an odd glance – or at least he thinks she does – but doesn't mention it. She simply moves around behind the chair. "Sorry about your head…flopping. But, um, there's not much I can do right now," she tells him awkwardly instead, and he tries to shrug and hardly manages more than a twitch.

"I-it's okay, Gr-ranger."

"Ready to go?" she asks him next, leaning forward over his shoulder a little as she hangs onto the wheelchair handles, and it is disconcerting to slide his eyes across and see her face right there beside his; so _close_.

He licks his lips falteringly, and says what he has been wondering since she first mentioned taking him away from here – and hasn't been able to figure out, either. "Wh-where are w-we going?"

"What?" She seems puzzled. Draco frowns; it is an effort to speak, and he wants her to just understand, damnit.

"Where? A Muggle h-h-hospital? Th-the Ministry? _Azkaban?_" He struggles to get the words out without stammering or slurring his words, and Granger makes a shocked, somehow _prudish_ kind of sound that manages to irritate and worry him simultaneously, even with all the potions fuzzing up his mind.

"Azkaban? My god… _No_, Malfoy. I'm – I'm taking you, er, home," she says, her voice dropping into quietness as she says _home_, her awkwardness about it palpable. And his brows furrow together and his head whirs frantically, because what the fuck does _that_ mean?

"_Home?_" For a moment Draco thinks of his mother, that Granger means she is taking him to his mother, and his heart leaps, and then he realises he couldn't ever be so lucky, and the wheels click in his dulled brain and he realises. "_Your _h-h-home?"

She sounds almost embarrassed when she answers him. Just one word. "Yes."

There is a long pause as he searches for words, but none come; his thoughts are scattered like fishes, silver streaks in the potion-murked waters of his mind. "Oh," he says simply, stupidly, still trying to process that improbable truth, and no wonder she is freaking out about it. Draco had thought she would be ditching him temporarily in some Muggle hospital, or perhaps a magical hospital on the continent, or in America. Maybe even taking him to the remand cells in Azkaban, until she and the appropriate officials could figure out what in Merlin's name to do with a broken Draco Malfoy. Not – not taking him into her _home_, like a stray, wounded puppy she had found car-struck on the side of the road and couldn't bear to leave to suffer.

He doesn't _understand_, because in honesty the debt that she owes him – if she does owe him one really, at all, because she _shouldn't_ owe him for halting her torture, any decent person should do that and it isn't _her_ fault that Bellatrix reduced him to a ruin for stepping in… Draco's head spins away with him locked inside it, and he breaks free from nightmarish memory and confusing moral issues into a semblance of sanity, with a gasp for breath and a furrowed brow. Granger shouldn't owe him _this _much. And they both damn well knew it. She and him both, and he blinks down at his hands – folded with tender care in his lap by her warm hands – with blurry confusion.

"_Why?_" he asks her, and she sucks in a deep, unsteady breath, and he knows then that she won't – can't – answer him any more than _he_ can hope to answer the question.

"Come on, Malfoy." The wheelchair jerks as Granger shoves it into motion, and they jostle out the bathroom door easier than it was to get the chair in, and sure enough, she doesn't answer his question. It runs round and round his head in circles though as she pushes him out of the white room with its barred window; he isn't sorry to see the back of it. He would spit on the floor if his mouth wasn't dry and not working right; he fears he would more than likely just dribble slightly down his own front, and that is yet another humiliation that he doesn't need added to the list of indignities that he's already suffered.

The white corridor toward the exit seems to stretch on forever, and Granger's shoes squeak faintly on the floor, keeping time. Draco's heart is squeezing in his chest, and each beat of it seems to strain toward those big double doors and the – not _freedom, _no, he doesn't get to have that – _safety _that lies beyond. Not being left to convulse in his own filth anymore, helpless and useless, slowly wasting away because he hardly ever eats the food they leave him, his skin patterned bruised all over, mostly self-inflicted injuries, but he remembers a time or two... And thanks to those handful of times – visits from some kid around Draco's own age in cleaner's garb, white-lipped angry and snarling at Draco about his dead mother – not all the piss he had been left to rot in had been his either.

He doesn't blame the kid, although that doesn't mean he hates the bastard any less. It's not Draco's fault that his father had apparently done more than he'd let on to Draco and his mother. It's not Draco's fault his father killed on Voldemort's orders, it's not his fault his mother is still alive, and yet he would want to do the same damn thing as that pimpled, angry kid if their positions were reversed. And he would have been a hell of a lot nastier than putting in the boot a few times and taking a leak on him. Still, the humiliation stings hot and furious, and if he saw the kid now and were capable of hurting him, he would give tit for fucking tat and more besides.

But it's a pipe dream, he thinks bitterly, head dropped to his chest and hands useless, unable to even stand, still hurting even drugged to the gills.

Then the ward doors swing open and they are out in the light, white airiness of the waiting room, the nurses' station at the right and he flinches as he lifts his head enough to see the Healer that has been chief perpetrator during his stint in fucking _purgatory_. She lies slumped unconscious in the chair behind the desk, her mouth agape and her arms hanging at her sides. She is still fucking _terrifying_ and Draco cringes back into the chair _shaking_, remembering all the things she said as she poured his potions down the sink while he seized in agony on the floor, _begging_ her. _Please. Please._ And she had laughed at him, and told him he was nothing. He was _disgusting_. He _deserved _it. Every bit of it, he deserved, for his father's sins and for his own.

"It's okay," Granger says softly, and her hand settles on his skinny shoulder and squeezes lightly, and he doesn't know _why_ she comforts him. Why is she _doing _this? Why is she being so kind? "I _stupefied_ Pam, the, um, Healer. She should be out for a while." She pauses, then adds, "I don't think – I mean, I think she went mad after her sister…died."

"Yeah." His voice comes out scratchy and raw, and all the edges of the word slur together sloppily, and his stomach is sunk like lead, and sick with it. He keeps waiting for Granger to say that it wasn't entirely the Healer's fault; after all, Draco had deserved it, hadn't he? But she doesn't say anything at all at first, just wheels him over toward the desk with a sad little sigh. He wishes he could see her face, and the expressions crossing it so damn clear. Granger is shit at hiding her feelings, all of them marching over her features with perfect clarity; the Mudbl– _witch_ is an open book.

"I'll make sure that she gets the help she needs, the poor woman," she begins, and Draco suddenly, unexpectedly, and _stupidly_, wants to cry because like a fucking _fool _he had thought – _hoped_ – that maybe… And then: "And make that she can't _ever_ hurt you again, Malfoy," comes out of Granger's mouth instead of accusations of _dirty_, and _worthless_, and she sounds _angry _on Draco's behalf, her voice clipped and actually shaking. And it feels like something cold and hard in his chest _cracks_ and warmth comes seeping out it, alien and too damn much. He can't speak; something is choking up his throat, and his eyes water and run over and he trembles, not from his damned _condition,_ but from an abject and consuming sense of relief.

Granger moves around the wheelchair and scoops up a box that sits on the floor by the desk, tucking it under her arm, and Draco sees her cast a glance over the Healer, her lip curling in an eloquent expression of disgust and pity mingled. Her wand flicks and then the Healer is bound securely in twisting ropes, her wand summoned to Granger's hand. She glances around for a place to put it, arms full, and then sits the wand and box both on Draco's lap. He manages to move his heavy arms enough to get them out of the way, so that they bracket the box.

"Do you mind?" Granger asks lightly, and Draco shakes his head in an infinitesimal _no_. "The box is for you, anyway, actually." She sounds a bit awkward admitting that, and Draco's brow furrows.

"What –?" He lifts his head to stare at her, still frowning in bewilderment, and Salazar's name it takes the effort of climbing a mountain just to hold up his damned head; how much muscle relaxant did Granger _give_ him? "What d-do y-you mean?"

She presses her lips together hard, looking as awkward and nervy as a child caught in a lie as she shifts from foot to foot, shoes squeaking and hair fluffing. She deftly unfolds one of the box flaps, and dips a slim hand inside, rifling around in the depths which he cannot see into. "I went to the auction," she says as though admitting a crime – just confusing him more because he knows an auction means something, but he can't remember _what_. Then after an odd little pause, Granger shows Draco what she has pulled out of the box. It is a photo.

His heart clenches.

He remembers that day.

His parents' tenth anniversary. Draco had been five, tired after a long day out celebrating the happy occasion at a boring adult gathering, and his small set of dress robes had felt scratchy and too hot. He'd stood patiently on sore feet throughout most of the official photos, but had whined and complained toward the end. And instead of scolding him, in the very last photo his father had boosted him up on one hip despite him being a big boy of five, and his mother had leant in to kiss his forehead, pushing his hair back off it with a gentle smile, her lips cool and soft. He remembers feeling so wonderfully, uncomplicatedly _loved_.

It is one of Draco's favourite photographs of them as a family, and he had felt a hollow grief to think it destroyed along with the rest of his personal things, because he knows there will never be a time that they are that happy again.

"Th-the Malfoys' in h-h-happier times," he whispers with an edge of wry bitterness, because look what has become of the three of them now. One locked in prison, one broken beyond repair, and one alone and grieving the loss of the other two, and all the innocence and happiness that the photo captured _sucked_ out of them by Voldemort, the evil bastard, and the war he made. Granger seems to understand his feelings, because her face is set in not just sympathy, but _empathy_.

"I took what I could from your room," she says hesitantly, tipping the large box for a moment to give him a glimpse of the inside – stuffed to the brim with _his things_, and a glorious feeling settles over him. "I hope you don't mind me digging around in your, um, private stuff, but I thought that –"

"_Thank you_," Draco blurts so forcefully and suddenly that it actually makes Granger jump a little in fright. The gratitude he feels is disturbing in its strength, and he stares at the photo she is tucking into the box and wants to cry for so many reasons. He can't even make sense of them anymore. Can't make sense of _anything_, and he doesn't know if it's the potions that flow thick in his bloodstream and make everything muddled and hazy and strange, or if it is _Granger_ and what she is doing, how she is being so _nice_ to him. It is discombobulating. She bites her lip and shrugs slim, straight shoulders uncomfortably beneath the weight of his thanks.

"You're, erm, welcome, Malfoy. It was no trouble, really," Granger says to him with distinct embarrassment, before shifting back out of his view, hands gripping the wheelchair handles as they set off again, wheeling fast away from the Janus Thickey Ward. Draco feels better every step they move away from it and the Healer bound at the desk before the entrance to it. His hands can move just enough for him to curl his fingertips around the box, and he clutches it with all the feeble strength he has. _Mine_, he thinks, and pathetic tears are wet in his eyes as his fingertips shift over the smooth dryness of the cardboard with a whispering sound. _Mine._

"I had better talk to the head of department before one of the other Healers finds Pam," Granger says, and Draco hears her as if from within a dream, far off and unimportant. _Mine_, he is thinking; all he has left to him and it is fitting that, broken and pathetic wreck he is, he should only have one cardboard box of faded memories to his name. Everything that is ended, to stare at and remember, and _wish_ impotently that it could be like that again. And he is grateful for even this; both less and more than he feels he deserves, depending on which small voice in his head he listens to.

"And whoever they are," she goes on, a righteous touch of classic Hermione Granger indignation in her tone that Malfoy remembers from school, "They are going to learn a valuable bloody lesson about _ethics_ today."

**Head of the Department of C.A.D's Office, 4****th**** Floor, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

Alfonso Chidgewick, Head of the Department of Curse and Artefact Damage, is a small man with curly dark hair and a fussy beard, who shrinks before the full force of Hermione's anger as she unleashes it upon him in a tirade that felt so _good_. She had _tried_ to speak calmly with him for the initial few minutes of their impromptu meeting, but he had made excuse after excuse about why Malfoy's horrible treatment had not been rectified immediately, and she has now lost her temper completely. And it feels as wonderful as she can hope to feel right now.

It's obvious that everyone in the damn department was in on it – if not half the bloody hospital, and that no one _cared _horrifies and disgusts Hermione. She cannot believe it – doesn't _want_ to believe it – but she has to. Everyone who swore to heal and do no harm has been allowing this travesty – this torture – to go on. They have, if not actively participated in making Malfoy suffer, then at the least turned a blind eye to the suffering others were inflicting on a helpless patient in their care. And that is very nearly as bad, in Hermione's mind. They are supposed to be the _good_ guys, the _light _side, the upstanding wizarding citizens that Hermione and so many others fought for – she supposes that is a rather naïve view, but it is one she still clung to up until _now_, when the last shreds fall away. Ron died for _Chidgewick_; the thought _revolts_ her to the point of actual nausea.

It seems now to Hermione that sometimes the only difference between the people on opposing sides is which leader they choose to rally behind. And oddly, she thinks she may have some small idea of why Harry had to get away. Right now she finds herself wishing _she_ were in an utterly isolated monastery in Nepal.

"You _must _have known!" Hermione is stuck barking furiously at Chidgewick instead of hiding in a peaceful sanctuary, hands planted on her hips, Healer Pam's wand on the desk between them. Her face is so hot from emotion that she knows it must be an unflattering shade of red, and adrenaline runs fiery through her body, making her heart beat quick, perspiration break out on her skin, and her fingers want to tremble like Malfoy's. Chidgewick keeps his desk between them like a barrier of safety, faux apologetic and making up lies so fast that Hermione is surprised to see the House emblem on his wall that implies he was a Hufflepuff and not a Slytherin, the weaselly bloody bastard. Although to be fair, he is a really _horrible_ liar, so she supposes he wouldn't have made a _good _Slytherin.

"Miss Granger, I cannot possibly be aware of everything going on in my department! I require my staff to bring such matters to my attention, as I have told you three times already!"

"Then as I have already asked you, _why didn't they?_"

"This was obviously the work of one lone individual, sadly – but understandably – deranged by the loss of a family member. No doubt she, er, hid the…_incidents_…from the rest of the staff."

"Mister Chidgewick –"

"Healer," he interrupts. "_Senior_ Healer Chidgewick, actually, but Healer Chidgewick is fine."

Hermione raises an eyebrow, not impressed with the little man's priorities – in fact, rather appalled and definitely in a rage. "_Mister_ Chidgewick. As I told you not two minutes ago, there is _no way in hell _that Mister Malfoy's state was not obvious to every person who came in contact with him." Granger flings an arm out toward Malfoy. The entire time she has been speaking with Chidgewick, Malfoy has sat small and fragile looking in the wheelchair by the door, utterly silent and clutching the box sitting on his lap like it is the most precious thing in the world. It probably is to him, she realises with a terribly sad sense of horror, and it makes her heart _hurt _for him. She hurts for _Malfoy_, and yet with each passing minute the fact that he is Draco Malfoy seems to matter less and less to Hermione.

He is a _human being_, and they have treated him like an looks near-skeletal huddled still half-filthy in the wheelchair, and the wounded, beaten-dog look in his grey eyes makes Hermione want to throw things and _scream_.

"_Look at him!_" she cries. "When I found him, he was fallen on the floor of his bathroom, semi-conscious! He clearly hadn't been able to get to the toilet, nor feed himself properly, in _days_. How did your staff not _notice_ that?"

"There are only two staff members assigned to Mister Malfoy, and perhaps Healer Gibbons – Pam – somehow managed to convince the day Healer that someone else had taken over their duties, when in fact that was not the case," Healer Chidgewick tries as he shuffles through the shift rotation parchments on his desk, and Hermione makes a harsh exasperated sound.

"If that _were_ the case, then there are clearly some _severe_ issues within your department, and major problems with how it operates. Things like this _shouldn't be allowed to happen_," she emphasises in a snarl, staring the man down. "I plan to take this deplorable case of _torture_ not only to your superiors here at St Mungo's, but to the Ministry! It'll be all over the papers, and –"

"No one will care, Miss Granger," Chidgewick said then, perfectly calmly and Hermione's impassioned speech rattles off to nothing as she stares at the small man gape-jawed. "Now, truthfully, I had no _idea_ that this was going on. And from now on, I shall oversee Mister Malfoy's care personally, to ensure there is not a repeat of this unfortunate affair. But if you go to the Ministry and 'blow this wide open'," he says fussily, "Not a single member of the wizarding public will give a toss – unless of course, they secretly _approve_ of his treatment. You seem to forget Miss Granger, that Mister Malfoy was a Death Eater. He _killed_ several people, and injured rather a lot, if what I have heard from the Ministry's 'interview' with him via _Legilimency _is correct. Even _your_ stellar and well-deserved reputation as war heroine is not enough to make people care about the plight of criminal scum like _him._"

And what can Hermione say to the truth? She stares at the horrible little man, horrified and disgusted but unable to argue with him, because beneath all her righteous anger, she knows that Chidgewick's assessment of the public's view is correct. No one will care. There is really nothing that she can do that will have any kind of lasting effect, that will make any kind of positive change. Save one thing, of course. Hermione lifts her chin and stares Chidgewick down. "You must be joking if you think you're keeping Malfoy here after what you allowed to be perpetrated upon him. I'm taking him with me."

"Miss Granger!" Chidgewick begins to turn a rather unattractive shade of puce, his voice going up an octave or three. "You can't do that! Draco Malfoy is not only a patient here, but a prisoner! He is to be kept _confined!_"

"And I shall _keep_ him confined; not, however, that I think he will be going anywhere without a great deal of assistance – do you, Mister Chidgewick? Do you fear he is going to just…get up and run away?" Hermione asks him, her voice dripping sarcasm – it and her anger both sharp enough that they cut the air like a blade and make Chidgewick's puce colouring drain to an ashen pallor. "He can't even _walk_ Mister Chidgewick. He's unable to use his magic, appears to be suffering constant pain, and he has nowhere to try to run _to_. I am quite sure that I will be able to keep him securely contained without issue." She glares at the man. "And I have no doubt that given what unfolded here, and my…status in the public eye –" She doesn't feel guilty at all about using her war heroine reputation at this point; it's for a good cause, not her own gain, and _oh _it feels good to see Chidgewick stammering across the desk from her, lost for words. "– well I doubt that the Auror department or the Minister of Magic will object to my actions."

"And _I_ doubt they will be happy that a prisoner has been taken from this facility without due process being followed, but be that on your head, Miss Granger," Chidgewick says with an edge of prissy anger running through his words, and Hermione smiles coldly at him.

"Excellent," she hisses, her fists clenching involuntarily at her sides, wanting to just haul off and hit the slimy bastard. "I shall need a month's supply of Mister Malfoy's potions then, immediately. Unlike your staff, I do not plan to torture him by withholding necessary medication."

"That will take a little time to arrange. Perhaps twenty minutes or so," Chidgewick says, still all brimming with anger that he keeps stifled just beneath the surface, but not well enough – Hermione can hear it clearly in his clipped tone, and see it reflected in his shiny-dark eyes. "If you will take a seat in the waiting room down the end of this corridor, I will have a Brewer bring them to you as soon as they are ready."

She is about to agree, when Malfoy speaks for the first time. "Gr-Granger?" She whirls toward him immediately, concern writ on her face. There is terror on his; a glazed, feverish fear, and he struggles to hold his head up with an effort, his too-long hair falling over his face, and her fingers itch to tuck the strands out of the way. She refrains – Merlin knows what Chidgewick might read into _that_ – approaching him in his wheelchair by the door so as to give the illusion of privacy, while Healer Chidgewick remains behind his desk_._

"I w-want to g-g-go," Malfoy whispers, sounding painfully like a frightened little boy. "P-please, Granger. _Please_, I-I want t-t-to go…" His grey eyes are dreamy-lost as though he is trapped within a nightmare, and huge and wide in his thin face, heightening the little-boy appearance, and Hermione feels heart-sick.

"Okay," she says softly, tone automatically reassuring and warm as she falters a smile. "Okay, Malfoy, we'll go." She turns to Chidgewick, and feels her features harden, her expression turning grim and disgusted, as if the Healer is a cockroach to be crushed beneath a boot. "I will send Kreacher, the House Elf at the residence I am staying in, to collect the potions from the Potions Brewer. I expect him to return with them within the hour, or there will be further…consequences."

Chidgewick looks rather more sullen than a middle-aged professional should do, but nods stiffly and without complaint, although his voice is seething with resentment beneath the faux-civility. "Of _course_, Miss Granger."

"Good. I expect I shall see you again soon, Mister Chidgewick; no doubt there will be a trial for Healer…Gibbon, was it? I shall call the Auror offices this afternoon to sort out all the red tape surrounding Mister Malfoy's change in location, and I will expect to hear that you have reported this entire mess to them, as is your duty – and told them that I will be in touch with them promptly."

"Of course," Chidgewick grits out, and Hermione nods, grimly satisfied, and turns on her heel to leave without another word. She flinches a little inside herself as Malfoy comes into view and she is struck afresh by how broken and pathetic he looks. She wheels him out silently, and _slams_ the door behind her hard enough to make half the doors up and down the corridor rattle in their hinges. It is quite satisfying, in a petty sort of way.

"Come on, Malfoy. Let's go."

**Apparition Point, 2nd Floor, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries**

Nearly everyone who has seen Draco on the winding trip up and down hospital corridors to the apparition point has stared. Not all of them have seemed to recognise him with certainty, but they all obviously wonder if he is indeed who he appears to be. He doesn't know _what_ he looks like – he hasn't been able to reach the mirror in over a week – but from Granger's reaction to him, and the more muted reaction of everyone else, Draco imagines he looks rather wretched. Pitiful. Disgusting. He sees pairs and small clusters of people whisper to each other and shoot him _looks _as Granger wheels him past, and he can imagine what they are saying.

He shuts his eyes, instead of watching their mouths shape horrible things as their faces shift from neutral pleasantry to revulsion and _anger_.

"Here we are." Granger's soft voice breaks into Draco's half-trance, and he blinks up at her with eyes that feel heavy and sleepy. "I can't disapparate with the chair. You'll have to…hmm…" She frowns down at him and the rather large box, her hands on her hips and a crease between her dark, straight brows. With him in the useless state he's in, it takes about five minutes to just get everything sorted so that they can apparate, and the people waiting to have their turn start whispering angrily. _Death Eater filth_, he hears.

_What is she doing with him?_

_He should be in Azkaban._

_Maybe that's where she's taking him._

_I hope he rots there._

_He's already half-rotted, by the look of him._

"Leave him alone!" Granger cries suddenly, straightening from settling Draco down on the floor with a levitation charm. She has propped him against the wall with the box hugged in his arms and attached firmly to one hand by a simple sticking charm. The people flinch back from her, shocked by her sudden outburst, and Draco can see enough of her face to see she has blushed bright red. "I'm – I'm sorry. I – no, _actually,_ I'm not sorry. He can hear you, you know. Have some _decency_."

"He doesn't," someone mutters sullenly, and Granger huffs, but says nothing in response. Draco supposes vaguely that there isn't much she can say in response to that, because he didn't have decency – or doesn't, whatever. Her chin and bottom lip tremble briefly, and when she turns to him there are tears swimming in her eyes unshed, and her jaw is clenched hard. She crouches down at his side, wrapping her arms around him without hesitation, her wand in one hand, her chin brushing the top of his head. And Draco is too dazed to find it awkward that his head falls so that his forehead is nestled into the join of her neck and shoulder, and she is so warm and smells so sweet, even with the hint of fresh sweat beneath her perfume.

Then everything whirls and constricts around Draco horribly, and for an airless, sightless, disorienting moment, the only things that exist are Granger pressed against him and the heavy box in his lap.

* * *

**Please leave a review! I love your feedback :3**

Just a quick note – I am still working on The Just World Fallacy, but with ridiculous slowness because I am suffering awwwwful writer's block – but it _shall _get done. I also have no intention of abandoning Of Onions & Icebergs – it's just gone back on the backburner while I finish this and Crumple, because I was suffering some block with _it_ as well :\ But rest assured, I shall not abandon any of my Dramiones :)


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